Jesse Eisenberg
Jesse Eisenberg
Jesse Adam Eisenbergis an American actor, author and playwright. He made his television debut with the short-lived comedy-drama series Get Real. Following his first leading role in the comedy-drama film Roger Dodger, he appeared in the drama film The Emperor's Club, the psychological thriller The Village, the comedy-drama The Squid and the Whaleand the drama The Education of Charlie Banks. In 2006, Eisenberg won the Vail Film Festival Rising Star Award for his role in The Living Wake...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth5 October 1983
CityQueens, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I always think the second worst thing in the world is to go on stage at night, and the first worst thing in the world is sitting at home at night. For me, it's scarier to not be doing it than doing it.
I view myself in the narrowest possible terms, but I don't watch anything I've been in, and I don't read reviews or analysis of movies I've been in, or my plays.
I think the most important thing for an actor is reading the script and trying to figure out if you can play that character well. The last thing on my mind is if the director made good movies previously. It's not my job to know if that director's last movie was any good - it's my job to know if I can play the role.
If you look at the movies that come out, most of them are bad, so it's not as if achieving some level of success means you get offered better roles, because frankly they don't seem to exist.
My hope is to never act again and just do press.
If you went to Harvard Medical School, chances are you'll be a doctor at some place. There's a career trajectory. Acting, there's nothing. It's constantly trying to procure jobs - it's very disconcerting.
My feeling is... when you show up to a movie set where there's, like, 50 people standing around and months of preparation gone into it, you want to be as prepared as possible, so you should make a million baguettes. That might not actually help in any explicit way, but it'll make you feel more prepared.
My job when I'm acting in a movie is very limited to playing a role. I'm not evaluating somebody. I'm only evaluating them insofar as they're interacting with me, but I'm not evaluating their skill set and I don't watch the movies, so I'm not aware of the way they're putting things together.
When you take on a role, even if the character is somebody that you are dissimilar to, you have to identify with the role and look for an emotional connection even if there is not a biographical one.
Acting is kind of difficult to intellectualize - it's a far more visceral experience. It's really hard to be able to think about and then employ these kind of esoteric notions of this person's backstory and try to weave it in somehow. It's just kind of impossible.
I live in New York City, where, if you're in a movie at a popular independent theater, you think you're king of the world, because you're in a bubble. So there's no way for me to properly conceive of the attention that the movie gets in a way that doesn't make me confused.
I'm kind of shocked any time somebody hires me and even more shocked any time somebody hires me to play a character like Lex Luthor, which I only knew from the public consciousness of him being a bald, brooding villain who is older than me.
To criticize Facebook is to criticize the telephone.
The only way to be turned off to being famous is to be famous.