Jesse Eisenberg on criticism, growing up and writing for the stage

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The actor says The Revisionist, his play about a self-involved novelist, is an exercise in introspection and he doesn’t care for critics of Batman v Superman

The third week of March must have been a blur for Jesse Eisenberg. On the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank promoting Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, to which he lends a maniacal millennial angst as Lex Luthor, he was also checking in on the west coast premiere of his three-person play, The Revisionist. Settling into a divan backstage, he is dressed in T-shirt and black jeans, looking anxious before his flight back to New York later that evening.

Stemming from his own experience grappling with self-doubt and career tumult, he wrote The Revisionist nearly 10 years ago and starred as the self-involved novelist, David, in the 2013 world premiere at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre.Vanessa Redgrave played Marie, his second cousin, a holocaust survivor. “On the first read through on this play, she was speaking perfect Polish,” he says of Redgrave, who had to learn some of the language for the role. “I asked her, how did you know how to do all that? She was like, ‘Well you gave me the play a month ago. I spent the last month working on it.’ I work on movies where you just don’t see that kind of commitment.”

The LA premiere marks the first time he has seen the play performed with a new cast, Deanna Dunagan and Seamus Mulcahy, directed by Robin Larsen. “When I heard they were going to do it out here at this wonderful theater, I was so honored to have something that is not only personal to me ’cause it’s about my family, but personal to me because I wrote it and I acted in it,” he says. But letting go is not always easy.

In the 2007 movie, The Hunting Party, Eisenberg plays a newbie journalist who tags along withRichard Gere and Terrence Howard on a misguided adventure in war-torn Bosnia. It was three years before his Oscar nominated performance in The Social Network, and the snarky solipsism of that portrayal had yet to become his trademark. Shooting on location in eastern Europe, Eisenberg, only 23 at the time, stopped in Poland for some self-exploration.

“I stayed with my second cousin, a 75-year-old woman who survived the war through a series of horrific circumstances, and I started realizing that my own plight by comparison was so insignificant and incorrectly dealt with,” he remembers. Now with three plays to his credit and numerous comedic essays inthe New Yorker, at the time he was having trouble finding his voice as a writer. He had written a number of mainstream comedies that went unproduced, so, at the advice of his friend, Bob Odenkirk, he decided to try his hand at something more personal.

In The Revisionist, David wants only peace and quiet so he can smoke some pot and work on revising his second novel. Maria lives alone, surrounded by portraits of relatives, mostly living in the US, who barely acknowledge her existence. David is one of them, impolitely passing on the meal she has laid out for him, and bowing out of the sightseeing trip she has planned. “This young man chooses to lament his fairly convenient life circumstance and this older woman celebrates a family that has abandoned her. Maybe it’s kind of a Nietzschean perspective that we are really the agents of our actions and we can choose what meanings we make from our circumstances,” Eisenberg pauses, then smiles and adds, “The kid who would smuggle pot into the European Union is the kid who has experienced no trauma in his life, whereas he meets this woman whose family was shot in front of her.”

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A Tony winner for August: Osage County, Dunagan wasn’t interested when she first read the part. It wasn’t the writing, but the fact that she would have to leave Chicago, something she rarely does, as well as learn a Polish accent and a smattering of the language. Worst of all was the idea of following Redgrave in the role. Her final decision is one she chalks up to something her mother used to say, “Deanna likes a challenge,” she smiles during a break in rehearsal, calling The Revisionist the most challenging play she’s ever done.

Mulcahy had only just stepped off a plane from South Carolina the day before the first table read when he learned that Eisenberg would be attending. “Direction coming from the playwright, your process isn’t fully intact because it’s being derailed by a playwright,” said Mulcahy about his biggest concern, which Eisenberg immediately put to rest.

“It’s inappropriate to interfere prematurely. If it was halfway down the run and I thought the character was doing something totally wrong, maybe you’d give them notes. But on a first read through they were on such a high level already,” the writer/actor was relieved to find.

It might have been a lesson he learned after he was cast as Lex Luthor and the internet blew up with trolls vehemently against him playing Superman’s mortal enemy before a single frame of film was shot. “This character is pretty explicitly vile although he has a charming public front. I think the average person would be able to figure out that he’s pretty evil,” he says, noting parallels to real-life public figures that go unnamed.

If Eisenberg is at least partially vindicated by reviews, not so the movie, which received only 29% “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes. Either way, he doesn’t much care what critics say, considering the film is the studio’s largest opening of all time. “I don’t have a perspective on the craft or culture of film criticism,” he says, when asked about his New Yorker piece, An Honest Film Review, about a bitter blogger. “I was making fun of an individual who is fictitious, who is using the medium to lament his own life,” he cautions. “It has nothing to do with my opinion of film critics.”

Eisenberg’s next movie, Louder Than Bombs, hits theatres next week, and later this year Café Society, directed by his idol, Woody Allen, will open this year’sCannes Film Festival. In it, he plays an aspiring film-maker in 1930s Hollywood. It’s the kind of story the town was built on, and a road Eisenberg’s been down before.