Filming the Jesse Plemons Mass Grave Scene

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Civil War.]

When Consequence spoke with the cast of Civil War about the film’s most memorable scene, star Cailee Spaeny perhaps spoke for all of them about the experience: “I was like, cinematically as a film lover, I think that that will be very effective. And then, as a human being, I really didn’t want to act that scene out. I really, really didn’t want to do that.”

The scene in question, filmed over two days in the hot Georgia sun, takes place more than midway through the film, as a small team of journalists encounter some heavily armed militiamen overseeing the filling of a mass grave. When their leader (Jesse Plemons) starts interrogating the journalists about their individual nationalities, the action dips into full-blown horror.

The cast knew from the script stage that this would be the toughest scene of the film to shoot. “Alex is a writer first,” Spaeny says. “That sounds like it would be obvious, that all the things that you see on screen would be on the page, in terms of emotion. But a lot of times you get scripts and it’s a long way away from what actually ends up on screen.” For Civil War, though, “the dialogue in itself is just so terrifying and chilling and haunting, and that was all there in Alex’s script.”

Knowing what was in store thanks to the script, Wagner Moura says, meant that “You start shooting the movie, and like a week before, you know that you’ll have to shoot that scene — and that starts to bring some sort of anxiety. Because when Jesse comes to me and says, ‘What kind of American are you?,’ it moved me in a very personal way — because I am an American citizen, but I’m Brazilian. I speak with an accent. I’ve been living here for less than 10 years. And that is a scene about xenophobia and racism.”

“So,” he continues, “I caught myself, before the film, already thinking about this polarized moment. Like, how would I react if I was someplace else, like in the deep south, and someone that saw me speaking with my accent came to me and asked, ‘What are you doing here? Why don’t you go back to your country?’ I don’t know what I would do. I don’t know how I would react to that. And I had to think about that for two days while they were shooting that scene — having Jesse Plemons asking that question to me, many, many, many, many, many, many, many times: ‘What kind of American you?’, pointing a gun at me?”

Plemons, beyond his own remarkable, Oscar-nominated body of work, is married to Civil War star Kirsten Dunst (they have two sons together). Originally, Spaeny says, a different actor was cast for the part, but “in the rehearsal process, the actor who was going to play it had to pull out for scheduling reasons. It was devastating, because we knew we needed someone who was really going to go there for this scene, and Kirsten in rehearsals just said, ‘Well, Jesse’s here being dad. I’ll ask him and see what he says.’”