Jesse Eisenberg: High Drama
Repost from VOGUE
Jesse Eisenberg has parlayed a brainy, made–in–New York brand of awkwardness into a flourishing film career, whether playing the preternaturally brilliant but painfully self-conscious child of divorce in The Squid and the Whale or the preternaturally brilliant but painfully self-conscious Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. In other words, it was only a matter of time before Woody Allen cast him as his alter ego. Sure enough, in Allen’s upcoming Bop Decameron,Eisenberg is what he calls “the irrational male protagonist.” Now, four decades after Allen made his Broadway debut as a playwright/performer with Play It Again, Sam, Eisenberg is starring Off-Broadway in his own comedy, Asuncion, as a cerebral, neurotic loser.
“I would say that Woody Allen is pretty much my favorite creative person of all time because he so reflects the way I view humor and culture and life,” Eisenberg, 28, tells me, slouched in a seat at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, the West Village company that is producing Asuncion. “With this play, I was trying to write a gritty, downtown theater piece, inspired by my friend Lucy Thurber’s Scarcity,which I was in a few years ago, but my style of comedy comes from such a different place. I guess it’s the merging of the two that makes it my own.”
Set in a ratty, cramped apartment in Poughkeepsie, New York, Asuncion focuses on Edgar (Eisenberg), a failed blogger and self-appointed expert on Southeast Asia (based on a two-day layover in Cambodia), and his roommate Vinny (played by his good friend, The Hangover’s Justin Bartha), an aggressively confident but equally clueless black-studies grad student. When Edgar’s brother, Stuart (Remy Auberjonois), mysteriously drops off his beautiful new Filipina wife, Asuncion(Camille Mana), to have her stay with the boys for a few days, their lives and, well, assumptions, get put through the wringer, exposing self-delusion, codependence, cultural imperialism, and general nastiness. Funny and sad, with a simmering air of menace, it’s a confident, well-crafted play that bodes well for the future. “I’m attracted to characters who are really bright and educated but have a great lack of life experience,” Eisenberg says. “Edgar has all sorts of opinions on race and politics and poverty, but he has such limited life experience that it just comes off as incredibly ignorant and naive.”
Eisenberg was born in Queens and grew up in suburban New Jersey, where he started acting, he says, as an antidote to the misery of school. At twelve, he made his Broadway debut in Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke as the boyhood self of Harry Hamlin’s character, and at thirteen, he understudied the role of Young Scrooge in a musical version of A Christmas Carol starring Tony Randall. “It’s amazing how casting directors can predict so incorrectly the way someone is going to turn out,” Eisenberg says. He started writing screenplays at sixteen and attributes his current desire to write roles for himself, at least in part, to the twin influences of his father, a professor of social psychology, and his mother, a birthday-party clown.
Eisenberg lives downtown with his girlfriend and a rotating cast of rescue cats and says he based his character partially on himself, including his disdain for American popular culture, an attitude that he describes as “really insincere and kind of pretentious because I totally rely on it for my living.” Still, Eisenberg says that Edgar is more of a caricature—his professed anatomical inadequacies, he is quick to point out, are “not autobiographical,” and the character’s lethal passivity is clearly not his own. “He feels that as long as he doesn’t do anything wrong, then he doesn’t have to feel guilty, so he decides that he’s never going to do anything at all—he’s never going to feel happiness, he’s never going to have any kind of romantic relationship, he won’t even, uh, pleasure himself, because he’s too self-hating and miserable,” Eisenberg says. “But it’s, you know, played for laughs.”
