Hollywood's Jesse Eisenberg is a playwright, too
Click here to read the interview or watch our back-up version below.
When at age 16 Jesse Eisenberg received a cease-and-desist letter from Woody Allen's lawyer, he knew he had a future as a writer.
The precocious teen had written a screenplay about Allen while attending a performing arts high school in New York City. People thought it was funny, so it got passed around to an agent, a manager and then eventually Allen's lawyer, who was not amused.
"It was really exciting to be corresponding with Woody Allen," recalls Eisenberg, now 32, while sitting in a trailer on the Warner Bros. back lot during a press day for his new film, "Batman v Superman," in which he plays supervillain Lex Luthor. "But it was in the form of a threatened lawsuit, so I put that script down and started writing other screenplays, because I felt confident in my abilities after that."
In his early 20s, he gave one of his screenplays to friend and mentor Bob Odenkirk, who told Eisenberg he was wasting his time writing dumb Hollywood comedies. You're a sensitive guy, Odenkirk told him, so write something personal. Eisenberg then wrote a play called "The Revisionist," about an arrogant yet deeply insecure young novelist who tries to vanquish his writer's block while visiting an elderly Jewish cousin in Poland.
That play is having its West Coast debut at the Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts in Beverly Hills through Sunday. It stars Tony-winning stage actress Deanna Dunagan and up-and-coming actor Seamus Mulcahy as the young writer, David. Eisenberg played David when the show opened in 2013 at the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre in New York. Vanessa Redgrave played the cousin, Maria, a Holocaust survivor with plenty of unsettling revelations tucked away in her closet.
"These women are two of my favorite actresses," Eisenberg says of Redgrave and Dunagan. "So this process has given me, as a writer, an opportunity to watch actors who are much better than me take on a role and intimately and thoroughly inhabit a character in ways that I, as an actor, have yet to do."
Eisenberg is thin and wiry, with an intense way of speaking that conjures a millennial Allen. In addition to contributing to the New Yorker's humorous "Shouts & Murmurs" column, he has written two other off-Broadway plays: "Asuncion," which premiered in 2011, and "The Spoils," which opened in 2015 and will play in London beginning May 1. Eisenberg has starred in all three of his plays, not necessarily because he wanted to, but because he felt compelled to.
"I think my stage fright and fear of doing the play gets trumped by my fear that it won't get done correctly," he says, adding that no matter how much he acts onstage he can't kick the feeling that something is about to go terribly wrong.
As much as it sounds as though Eisenberg can be a bit of a control freak with his plays, Robin Larsen, the director of "The Revisionist" at the Wallis, says he's anything but. She has called him a number of times for advice, which he happily gives -- but always with the caveat that he's sure her solution will be just fine.
Eisenberg writes what he knows, and what he knows is informed by a self-awareness that is so loaded it borders on neurotic. The characters he often ends up creating are narcissistic, whiny know-it-alls who are hard to like, but impossible not to watch.
"When I write plays, I try to find a part of myself that I think is absurd and I struggle to deal with or am self-critical about," Eisenberg says. "And then I put that quality in the character."
Eisenberg is excited that "The Revisionist" has taken on a life of its own without him at the Wallis. He feels perfectly comfortable watching Mulcahy claim the role he once inhabited, although he wasn't completely hands-off when it came to this production. After watching a lot of casting tapes, he saw in Mulcahy the first person to play the role just how he had pictured it.
Eisenberg is also starring in the small indie film "Louder Than Bombs," which opened in L.A. on Friday, about the family of a deceased war photographer confronting their feelings about her.
