Jesse Plemons Auditions for Todd

This is kind of a weird feeling, but with certain shows, you like them and their casts so much, that even after they end, you’re really pumped when their actors go on to do other cool things. Like you feel you’re somehow responsible for their careers by watching them in their first big roles.

I feel that way about the cast of Friday Night Lights, and think it’s cool when actors from the series are popping up in new projects. Surprisingly, the alumni who landed the biggest post-FNL role wasn’t one of the hot football studs or cheerleaders, it was Landry, Jesse Plemons. He now plays Todd on Breaking Bad, an initially minor character that eventually is responsible for some of the biggest plot turns in the show.

Here, for the first time, his audition tape has been leaked online. It’s interesting because in order to keep plot points a secret, the writers actually invented new scenes for the actors to rehearse that managed to keep the spirit of the scene in question without actually revealing it. In this case, Plemons plays a soldier being debriefed about an incident involving a group of Arabs and a teenage girl overseas, and the tone very obviously mirrors that of when he killed the dirtbike kid in the first half of season five. Really interesting to see.