Zach Gilford says he and Jesse Plemons 'would jump at' opportunity to reunite on screen: ‘He’s such a talented actor'

Zach Gilford is game to reunite and work with former Friday Night Lights costar and pal Jesse Plemons.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly about making his directorial debut in this week’s all-new episode of Criminal Minds: Evolution, the actor behind second-string quarterback Matt Saracen says he and Plemons “would jump at” the opportunity to work together again.

“There was one point years ago where we tried to develop an idea together, and we both just got busy and had to travel to separate places,” Gilford shares. (The ideas are hazy now, he clarifies.) “But yeah, I think either one of us would love to work with the other again. We are still very close friends and I'm just so happy for him and everything that's going on. I think there's no one else who deserves it more.”

“He's such a talented actor,” Gilford adds of the Oscar and Emmy nominee, who played his onscreen best friend Landry Clarke. “We had such good rapport that it was easy to fall into Saracen and Landry. That show was a lot of getting off the script and just letting the characters riff off each other, so it was fun to do that.”

The NBC teen sports drama followed the trials and tribulations of the Dillon Panthers in Texas, considered one of the nation’s best high school football teams and headed by Kyle Chandler’s coach Eric Taylor. It ran for five seasons between 2006 and 2011 and also starred Connie Britton, Minka Kelly, Scott Porter, Aimee Teegarden, and Taylor Kitsch.

Though Gilford has played varied roles in the years since his time on the football field (Midnight Mass, Good Girls, The Fall of the House of Usher), Matt Saracen still remains the one he’s most recognized for. He doesn’t mind it.

“It was an iconic show and a great role,” he says. “We all have a role that people always know us for, and I'm really lucky to have that one. And I've been really lucky to do a lot of different stuff since.”

The role of villain Elias Voit in Evolution, the Criminal Minds revival on Paramount+, for instance, has allowed him to flex an unanticipated acting muscle: his comedic one. Though he’s very much a bad dude, Voit offers some fan-favorite comedic relief this season as he spars with the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU).

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Gilford is having a blast. “I've never really done a comedy,” he notes. “People are always like, you're funny. You should be in a comedy. I'm like, thanks; tell some comedy director to cast me. So it's been fun to show a little more of that side of me. This season's great. I think we really built upon what we did in the first season and [leaned] into the streaming of it all. Last season we were kind of figuring out how this new version works, and this season we’re able to use that and build upon that.”

A new Gilford-directed episode of Criminal Minds: Evolution drops Thursday on Paramount+.