Jesse Eisenberg on Zombieland
Published September 30, 2009 in Movie Interviews
One of the comedy gimmicks of Zombieland is the obsessive compulsive perspective on survival. Jesse Eisenberg plays Columbus, named after his hometown, whose list of survival rules provides a comic juxtaposition with the gory kills he’s executing. Eisenberg Gives Rules to Zombieland “My character has an obsessive-compulsive disorder before the zombies take over,” Eisenberg said. “Then he uses it to his advantage when they do take over, because he’s obsessed with survival, and comes up with a list of 47 rules for how to survive in this post-apocalyptic world, including take Ziploc bags and buckle up because he has these very boring, practical rules that help him survive.” Eisenberg also had a humorous way of bragging about his entry in the zombie apocalypse genre. “It’s better. It’s so much better. It’s like 10 percent better than all of them. Every character in this movie is a very well rounded, interesting, fully dimensional, fleshed out, all those words that I learned in acting class. All of these characters are that, and that’s what, for me, separated it from other movies that are similar.”
There were some practical discomforts in filming the zombie attack scenes. “We all had puke at some point in our mouth, which was delicious. Puke, bile. It was like saltines and kind of a honey, a honey pomade.” Columbus teams up with Tallahasse (Woody Harrelson), whom he meets on the road, to weather the wasteland together. “It’s like an Oedipal thing,” Eisenberg joked. “I keep trying to suck on his breast. Oh, I mean, on set. Yeah, we were kind of like foils in the movie, dramaturgically speaking. I play a character that always runs from a fight, and he runs into a fight in the most creative of ways to kill zombies and I have made a long list of how to avoid them.”
