January 2012
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December 2011
46 posts
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Interviewer: Do you dislike promoting your movies?
Jesse Eisenberg: It’s not daunting, it’s just monotonous. We do the same interviews over and over. For Zombieland I did interviews with Emma Stone and she’s hysterical. We did about 50 interviews and it’s always the same questions, so what we did before each interview is give each other a phrase or a word we would have to work into the interview to make it a little more interesting. The only time we really laughed was when she made me say stiffy.
Interview: How did you work "stiffy" into the interview?
Jesse Eisenberg: I didn’t know what to say, but Woody Harrelson’s character is always drinking alcohol so I said, He always has a lot of stiffy drinks, and then I immediately thought of ejaculate and could not stop laughing.
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Thought Catalog: Jesse Eisenberg did the audio book for Be More Chill. Did you ever get to meet him? Have you read any of his McSweeney’s pieces, or seen his new play, Asuncion? You guys, on the surface at least, have a ton in common.
Ned Vizzini: I’ve never met Jesse Eisenberg but I hope to. In addition to doing the audio book for Be More Chill, he read from It’s Kind of a Funny Story at a benefit for the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, a nonprofit that I’ve been proud to support for years. I like his “Manageable Tongue Twisters” on McSweeney’s.
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INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me about your writing process [for "Asuncion"]?
JESSE: I wrote the first scene of the play over a course of a day or two because it was based on something that had happened to me and I thought it would just be an interesting scene. What happened to me was I was attacked on the street -- and I did an interview and I defended the kids who attacked me because they grew up in kind of a poor neighborhood. Then somebody sent me a letter with the interview attached, saying, "You racist, ignorant idiot to defend people who attacked. You're even more ignorant than wanting to put them in jail because you assumed that people who grew up in poor neighborhoods should be attackers." And I thought, well, he's right and that is a good point. I actually did do something very condescending and wrong.
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“I can say that I initiated the lawsuit based on the principle that artists...”
– Jesse Eisenberg on his lawsuit with Lionsgate
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Jesse Eisenberg on the thrill of the stage (via... →
moviesorientated:
My friend Dan once explained to me why he likes Jewish people: “In most families, you sit around the dinner table in silence until you absolutely need something from the other end. That’s when you’re forced to speak. But when I eat dinner with a Jewish family, the tiniest comment sets off an entertaining debate. Someone will say ‘I like this pasta’ and it’s immediately...
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INTERVIEWER: You're coming into the homestretch with this run here. What are you gonna miss the most, and what's been the best part of the experience for each of you with doing the show?
JESSE: I had this moment on stage early on in the previews where we were all on stage together. There's only brief moments where the four of us are really there together, and I just had this moment of feeling that when this is over, I'm not gonna remember how nervous I felt every night and how disappointed I felt when it wasn't going well, but actually how much I'll miss that experience of being, you know, treading water with three other people. And um, I haven't been able to get back to that feeling, but um, I look forward to it during Christmas.
JUSTIN: I would say the Pop Tarts and the bagels. Yeah I'm not gonna miss the people, more the Pop Tarts.
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INTERVIEWER: What I love about the theater is, actors come together and you get a play, and you form this family and you try to do the very best. You go through the trenches together of putting on a show. So what has it been like working together, all of you, because you guys are friends, so what's that dynamic like?
JESSE: When I act in a movie, I would compare the experience of working with the other actors as kind of being on a cruise together, like you have a fun time and it's nice--
REMY: All the food. All the food you eat.
JESSE: All the food, yeah. And also that you're kind of separated from your life. But the experience of working on a play with actors is like being in a life raft together. I feel like we're all staying afloat just because of each other. And it's such an intense experience, and if you're not surrounded by people you like -- and I've been fortunate enough to not have to have that experience, especially with this one -- I can only imagine it must be awful.
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INTERVIEWER: And for you, Remy, what attracted you to the play and how did it happen for you?
REMY: Same thing, Jesse reached out to me. He saw me do a play at the Atlantic -- "Anon." -- and I guess he recognized some familial connection buried deep inside us...
JUSTIN: The nose.
JESSE: Right. Yeah, 'cause we play brothers in the play.
REMY: He thought, "Oh yeah, he could be my brother," and so he reached out to me and I responded to the play and I felt like it was something I wanted to support, and obviously he's a um, you know, a, a... a precocious artist...
JUSTIN: Hmm.
REMY: So I wanted to support him and do it. And the part is a blast.
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INTERVIEWER: Is it easy, Jesse, when you're writing a role with someone's voice in mind? Is it easy to write a play that way?
JESSE: Yeah, it's easier -- I actually saw Remy in a play while I was writing it, Justin and I had worked together on a movie, and those voices stayed in my head. Camille I just got so lucky, because I had kind of written it with another voice in my head of somebody that I knew who is not an actress, and Camille does it so differently but so much better than I ever could have hoped for or imagined.
INTERVIEWER: Camille -- New York debut. Tell me what the whole experience has been like and how you were cast in the show.
CAMILLE: We'll talk about that after. [Laughs] But uh, no, no actually it's been fantastic. Like you were saying, [Justin and Jesse] are both old friends, so it was sort of daunting for me to come out here and play the title character in my first play in New York with these great actors, and you know, it came to me a year and a half ago? Jesse had asked me to do it and I remember reading the email from one of my reps, and it was just like, oh, Jesse Eisenberg would like you to play the female lead in his passion project, do you want to do it? I was like, really? Yeah, of course! So I mean, luckily we get along really well and everybody else as well, and it's been pretty phenomenal. And they welcomed me with open arms.
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INTERVIEWER: Justin, I know that you guys are good friends, so tell me how the play came into -- I know there's a story with this cast that we'll get into...
JESSE: We all slept with Herman Cain.
JUSTIN: You slept with Herman Cain too?
JESSE: [nods]
INTERVIEWER: ...How the play came to you in the role of Vinny.
JUSTIN: Well, Jesse -- Eisenberg -- he sent me the play. You know, over the years we've developed a friendship, just purely out of no one else would be friends with us, I think. So we would send material to each other, and he sent me this play that he'd written -- he sent me a couple plays that he'd written, Asuncion being one of them. Was it called Asuncion?
JESSE: Mmhmm. Yeah.
JUSTIN: And it was obviously very good, and we would do a couple readings over the years, and I think he wrote the character of Vinny with me in mind, kind of -- part of an amalgam, I think, of other people... So it was just a chance, we'd worked together once before and it was a chance to work together again.
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Jesse: Our play is about political stuff but it's also a very fun, you know, it's very comedic...
With this even homoerotic element...
Jesse: We have everything. We light candles on stage and play music and ummm... there's audience participation... there's dancing.
NPR Interview l Leonard Lopate Show, November 29, 2011
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I hear there's another play in the works and a musical?
Jesse: Yeah, I wrote a few other plays, hopefully we'll do one next year and then, um, I wrote a musical... Actually I started out doing musical theater, so that's kind of in my blood, uh, unfortunately.
And that was when you were growing up? Before you started doing television?
Jesse: Yeah when I was growing up. Yeah, yeah when I was about 7 years old I was doing musical theater up until the time I was about 15 I was always in a musical and you know, my mom thought that would be great for me 'cause she didn't know how to raise a boy. And I still really love it but kind of now as an audience member not as a participant.
NPR Interview l Leonard Lopate Show, November 29, 2011
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“What have you read or seen over the past year (book, play, film, etc…) that...”
– Guest Picks: Jesse Eisenberg, WNYC
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“In terms of assumptions about me, the more known I get, the more people kind of...”
– Jesse Eisenberg on social assumptions
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