Jesse Eisenberg
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yes. Oh, this is great. The left is that bad? The left is not great. Okay, great. Yes. Great. Can I do the old sitcoms, you know, 10 years of 20 episodes of Perfect Strangers? You're probably not going to get through Cheers. Okay. Okay. I'm not going to make it through Cheers. That's right. Okay. Yeah, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Oh, yeah. His dad worked at a cafeteria and then my dad was the first one to go to college in the family. Now he's a college teacher. So he's a bright guy. Yeah, really smart. How long was he driving a cab and working at the hospital? A few years in Queens. Oh, no, he worked at the hospital after that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
When I was a kid, he worked in hospital administration and then the hospital merged with another hospital. And so he started teaching.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
He teaches through the SUNY system at a school called Empire State. It's part of like the State University of New York system. SUNY as in opposed to Shiite? That's right. Okay. And which is weird. My mom is Shia.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is also on the Internet.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I mean, you got to acknowledge it's a very novel thing. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, she was not Bozo or like Barnum and Bailey circus. She was doing birthday parties in the tri-state area of New Jersey. I guess I never perceived it as my mom, the clown, because people didn't know. It wasn't like, wow, your mom's that clown. It was more like this is her job on the weekends.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Could you just put on tons of makeup for a second? Real quick, blow up 100 balloons. You know, it's actually funny. Now that people know me, people do come up to me and said, your mom did my birthday party because they've linked it somehow. But she was really great. So every Saturday and Sunday, she would basically wake up six in the morning, tune her guitar, blow up 100 balloons.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And so it was disciplined for a really silly performance. She was a business owner. She was a hustler. Yeah, actually, I didn't think of it that way. Yeah, that's like a good model to have as a mom, I think. And as a performer, because I work with a lot of performers who still have to get over the hump of thinking, this is so silly what I do. Embarrassing. Yeah, embarrassment.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And I just never really had that because I saw somebody who took it so seriously. My mom never said, so weird today. I was in makeup. It was just like, yeah, this was my job. This is what I'm doing. And I took it really seriously.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
She's 10 years younger, but she was through a series of weird, fluky things, was in movies and very popular commercials when, yeah, I was like 14.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
How do we get to... I was doing children's theater in New Jersey. And again, is there something mom just put you in? No, she put my older sister who was shy and I just wanted to be with my older sister. I didn't really like performing. It was on the weekends, children's theater every Saturday and Sunday. And then I had troubles in school.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And so I just wanted to do anything to have an outlet from school. So I started doing community theater. It's like non-professional, but with adults in same towns. And it was an amazing outlet for me. And then an agent from New York had come seen something and asked me if I would go on an audition for this play. It was Summer in Smoke, this Tennessee Williams play.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So 12 was your first professional audition. And you got it. Well, I got like the understudy. Well, that's a lot more than I've gotten on Broadway. Well, sure. But it was a really weird job to get at 12 because it was like, oh, you know how you like doing that acting thing? You're not going to get to do that at all.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, exactly. And then you're going to play poker and smoke cigarettes backstage with all the other people are kind of waiting for somebody else to get sick. Praying for an injury. Exactly that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
You go there every night. Again, for me, this was just a dream come true because I get to go to New York City every night. I didn't have to like interact with people at school because I had this other thing and I couldn't have friends anyway because I was leaving. I got to miss Wednesdays in school because they do the day shows and Broadway. It was just great.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Do you remember how much you were making? I think I do. Or at least I can figure it out because it was the Roundabout Theater on Broadway, which they had these special contracts where you can make something like $220 a week. It wasn't $1,000. Gosh, no, no, no, no, no. Because when I was 12 and you were paying me a couple grand a week to come hang and play poker.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Oh, God, no, there's like no economy for that kind of thing. I made money when I was just about to turn 16 and I got on a TV series, Get Real, this Fox show. That's when I made money. And we were all just in a state of bewilderment. Yes, I bet.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
She started making money at like five years old. And it was crazy. My parents are wonderful, wonderful people. And this is not a but this. This is an end this. And when my sister made money when she was younger, it was just like a weight off the shoulders of my house.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And they didn't even want to take her money. You know, there's the rules. It was just for the first time the lid went off the pot. And again, this is all for her for college. But there's a safety net somewhere in the mix. Somebody loses a leg. Yeah, it was like amazing. And then I got on this TV show. And then since that moment, it all just feels like a joke to me. Getting money for acting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
The whole thing just feels like a joke to me and my family and my wife. It all just feels like this is ridiculous. I can't believe no one's telling them they don't have to do this. That we would all be here anyway. Yes, yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
It's the armchair expert. I mean, can I pay? Even the promoting thing. I just got back from Poland promoting the movie that I filmed in Poland and being there to promote it. I was staying in literally the nicest hotel in Warsaw and it was the hotel that we would pass every day as we went to our bad apartments. And it's so funny.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So I'm like, oh my God, this is what it feels like to promote a thing versus when you're making a thing and there's a small budget for making an independent film and there's no money for any of that stuff.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So it's the best we ever live. You have just explained something that I have tried to articulate for a long time because it sounds like a little inside baseball-y of the movie industry. But what you just described is the very strange economy of promoting a movie. Yeah. And they have a set budget. They're like, we're going to spend 30 million marketing this or 5 million, whatever it is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So you doing that one magazine thing is the equivalent of them buying an ad in that same magazine, which would cost way more than your $150 hotel room. But for us, the trickle down, just ripple effect of it is you feel like this is crazy. It's the only time you feel like a movie star. Exactly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And the movie I made was $3 million, which again, this sounds a little insidery baseball, but it's like very, very little money to make like a real movie that requires tons of sets, et cetera. Absolutely.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I just literally came from a hotel where I asked them to put me in a smaller room because it makes me uncomfortable. I don't know if that's the New York thing. I just don't like smaller rooms. My bags are currently at the front desk because they're getting the smaller room ready. I feel a little out of sorts.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I feel a little weird. I feel like it's also wasteful. Like if there's a room that I'm not going to be in a lot, I don't want it to exist, you know? Sure.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
It's also like New York living, though. You would never get an extra anything in New York. You'd never get an extra closet in New York. You would put a friend there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Were you shy and nervous? No, no, no, no, no. I was hysterically crying when I was four years old. Like I kicked out of preschool because I couldn't leave my mom. I guess I maybe thought of it as separation anxiety or something.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
But it was just I was crazy. I mean, I went to a mental institution when I was 13 because I went crazy. I left school for a year. You did? I was like a very troubled kid. I don't know. Because of anxiety. Yeah, severe anxiety and all this stuff. OCD? Yeah, OCD, but it was more just like I couldn't go to school. It just killed me. When I was in first grade, I cried every day.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Sorry, it's kind of like a funny story, but it's also sad or whatever if you were me. Those are the best kinds.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
It was like sad if you were me, funny if you're basically anybody else. But I cried every day of first grade to the point where if I didn't cry on the bus ride, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, on Friday, the bus driver would give everybody Tootsie Roll Pops. And so I tried to not cry on the bus.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And then on Friday, literally on Friday, you'd hear down my block, don't cry, Jesse. People chanting at the bus because they would get to Zero Pops. So I would be holding it in until I got to school. Then I was allowed to cry.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
You know what's so weird? I always wanted to be bullied because I thought it would give me a reason. Yeah. For some reason, I wasn't.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
That's really weird. I actually never considered why. Maybe that's what it was. I think so. I was in sixth grade this one time. It was right before I left school. This kid, I'd never talked to him ever. And he picked up some wood chips and he threw them everywhere. And it was kind of in my direction, but it wasn't at me at all. I promise you, because I didn't know this person.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I promise you guys that you're not going to believe me. I was so desperate for them to hit me so I could have a reason for my misery. So I can pin it on something so I can tell my mom. No, I'm crying because this kid and I even knew his name because I was trying to concoct a story in my head where this kid was my torturer. And that's why school was hard for me. Yeah, it wasn't.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And it wasn't even at me. And that's in some ways like the saddest thing of all. I couldn't have a place for it. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Oh, this poor boy is going to get destroyed. That's exactly what happened. So he would like push me back to school. And then when I got out of the institution, it was basically like, if I don't go to school, then I go back to this place, which was terrible. He was doing tough love.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And also the fact that he was probably right, which is that if I just did it and committed to it and didn't have the option to not do it, I would probably learn to be OK. What was the institution like?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Does that make any sense? I don't recall thinking this is a great opportunity for me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Very vulnerable. I'm sensing we were different 13-year-old boys. I didn't go in there thinking like, I can clean up, you know, every cloud.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, exactly. Because you were doing that in school and everybody thought you were awesome. No, I remember asking this one kid for his shoelaces so I can kill myself. And then I was brought into a soft room with a deflated volleyball.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
No, I remember he was the coolest kid. I don't know what that means at the time. He was the Jack Nicholson character. Exactly that. And I remember asking him for the shoelaces thinking like, oh, he's going to think I'm cool. I don't know what the equivalent is like going up to the biggest guy on the jail yard and punching him in the face.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
You know, I was doing, I guess, but it was also punished for it. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Were you scared? That's how it felt. But I mean, I still have that same weird dread underlying, but I'm on like antidepressants now, so it helps a lot. But yeah, just that weird dread of the bottom is going to constantly drop out. It's weird. I'm doing this press tour and I just keep waiting for the bad thing to happen. We got good reviews. I was like, okay, that's good.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And then the movie did well on the opening weekend. They made more money than they thought. I was like, That's good. So now something really terrible is going to happen to me. So I thought it was going to be the movie, but now it's like, no, I'm going to get hit by the car. It's not even get hit by the car. It's more like existential.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Like people are going to realize I'm a terrible, something I live with this dread. I assume it helps me in some way.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah. And I do so enjoy my work. I feel like I just won the lottery that I get to be able to do something I genuinely like. So that's really helpful. And also my work is emotionally cathartic because it's an emotional job. And so that's really helpful too. All the stuff around it is really kind of unnerving.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
In terms of the negative motivation thing, we're in the arts and no one's really asking us. Now you have an incredibly popular show, but probably at the beginning, no one was begging you to do this. No one was begging you to be on Parenting. You know, all the stuff we're doing has to be self-motivating because no one cares. Like, oh, can you write a script today? No, no. Who gives a shit?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And so, like, I wonder if we in some ways are looking for some kind of motivation because there is no external demand to do the thing. It's not like you have to punch in like you guys created this from nothing and it's turned into this thing. Now, forcing yourself to think in these weird ways to motivate yourself. It's hard because I sit down, I write a script a year.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
My background is playwriting, but I don't really need to do that because I make money from acting. But I feel like I'm going to be a failure if I don't do it. And so I live with this dread of failure. And when I step back, sometimes I think, oh, maybe that's just the thing I create in my head to force myself to do the thing I like. Yeah. Is that possible?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
That's very true. And I'm not acting. My days look like this. I wake up in the morning. I'm depressed, but I'm so happy I get to take my kids to school. And I love my wife. I mean, that's not like an active thing. It's just something that's underlying the relationship.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yes. Some days there's an active loving my wife and some days there's just a passive. I love you, honey. And keep that in your mind. And then I just go into a real funk until the library opens at 1030, which is where I go write. Up until 10.30, a miserable, stupid failure. I can't believe I have the posture that Dax Shepard could recognize from 30 feet away.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
No other person would ever be in a movie studio with my posture. And then the library opens and then I go and I start writing and I'm sitting there laughing at my own jokes. Like the most arrogant guy in the world. And then I'm crying because I just wrote a monologue and I'm crying about the monologue and everything. And then I finish the thing and I go back home and I'm just such a loser.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I'm such a loser. My wife's going to leave me. I'm such a loser. Oh my God. My kid thinks I'm a bad role model. And it's so weird. But while I'm doing the thing, in some ways, I guess I think I'm amazing. I guess so. Because I'm sitting there writing it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, but my wife validates me as a person too. And my kid loves me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I know this thing that I'm outputting, which is not exactly me, is going to be okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
That is brilliant. So you're saying you'd be so ashamed to be the arrogant person that you should also be ashamed to be this person who's like self-loathing as though you've committed some great.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
But then don't you feel like, oh, my God, now I feel bad because I was a narcissist.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Why does this cross over to AA? Because drinking is trying to solve those problems.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And it's a thing that's very relatable to most people.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yes, that's really interesting. Have you ever struggled with any addiction stuff? No, I can't. I've tried. You've given it a go, like the cigarettes? The cigarettes. I've tried to really commit myself to being a stoner. This is going to probably sum up my entire personality. The following sentence, I've even experimented with coffee. Sometimes I'm like, I'm going to be a coffee drinker.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And so I'll drink it four days in a row and then I'll just start to feel queasy and fall asleep. And so maybe like my body is kind of like a lightweight. I can barely drink. I don't know why. Or I'm just really wired at a certain level that all that stuff is just not necessary.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah. When I was 16, I got exposed to his movies, which maybe is a little late. If you're going to be somebody like me, I could have used them earlier. Yeah. They could have shown it at the communal TV room at the institution would have been a great help. I would have gotten all the shoelaces, but basically I was writing a lot at the time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, you could smell him, but I really smell everywhere.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So the first screenplay I wrote was about Woody Allen changing his name to Woody at 16 years old, which he actually did. But I said it in modern day and in my life and situation and people liked it and it got sent around to various people and ultimately wound up at his lawyer who sent me a cease and desist letter.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
That's so flattering. Well, at the time, it really was. My dad came into the room. I was living at home. I was 16. He goes, I have good news and bad news. I was like, what is it? What's going on? He's like, we heard back from Woody Allen. And I was like, there can't be any bad news after that. And he was like, it's a cease and desist letter from his lawyer.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
His lawyer, incidentally, who was his producer, I got to know. Of course, the guy never knew. I'm sure it was somebody sending this letter 10 times a day to various people. Yeah. And it's so funny that you picked up on that and what you described was exactly like that for me. It's like somebody who's outwardly nervous and paranoid about all sorts of things, but who makes life work for him.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
This was just given to me. By someone else? By somebody else, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
He's just not interested in like... That kind of. Yeah, that kind of thing. Like, hey, you get this? Wow, a coincidence about me. He's somebody who's been so fetishized by culture. So I think he's just so uninterested in people telling him, hey, I got a brother who looks like you. I never told him ever. I knew he wouldn't care or think about it. And then we were on a panel for a press for a movie.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And somebody like it was a French journalist said, did Jesse ever tell you, you know, he did this thing? I looked over at him going, this is just going to be a waste of a time frame. He's not going to care. And he goes, oh, interesting. No, I never knew that. And we never talked about it again. That's exactly as you predicted. Exactly. He just has no interest. Maybe in me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I mean, one time he asked me because he had met my parents at a play that he saw of mine. Then we worked together again. And the only personal question he ever asked me was, you still have the same parents?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Oh, yeah. I had some weird things in my life occur. Probably a lot of it was circumstantial, but I do really have great parents. But yeah, I had some really weird stuff when I was a kid. And I'm maybe wired this way, but it's weird because my parents are actually comfortable, happy, normal people. They feel great in their own skin. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So there's deep depression and paranoia in the family, but not for my parents. So yeah, I think there was a series of weird things that happened when I was younger that probably accounted for all of my great personality problems. Okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Oh, no, no, she's a stylist, so perhaps she sprays everything before she gives it to me. I'm being dressed for the next month.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Again, I don't see them as problems. Yeah, exactly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I think people are going to really enjoy that. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah. So after that period, I started auditioning more for things. I went back to school. I was slowly integrating back into regular life while still auditioning and basically desperate to get a part because it meant I got to leave. And then I auditioned for a TV show. I was mostly auditioning for like off-Broadway shows, which is what I was doing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And then there was an audition for this show, Get Real on Fox. And I got the part. It was just crazy. I mean, it sounds almost maybe arrogant to say I didn't know I was funny because I was doing off-Broadway dramas like Tennessee Williams. I didn't know I was like a funny person. Right. And then the TV show was funny and my character was funny and he was the character was narrating the show.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So it was like a kind of comic voice. And I was auditioning and the people were laughing at the audition. These are like professional people. They had big shows on. And I remember thinking like, oh, I could be funny. I was partly doing an impression of a kid I met who was really funny and wry and stuff. And so then it was like, oh, I have kind of a voice.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And the show was basically asking me to do my voice. It wasn't asking me like in a Tennessee Williams play. You're like, I'm doing a Southern accent, but I'm a Jewish kid from New Jersey. Right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I'm fixing to go to the synagogue. Yes. And swim at the water hole later on. I want to do a mikvah a little later. Yes, exactly. Well, very good. Thank you. Oh, that's a great character.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, it's not helpful. Does he have like an accent?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Only. Only? One time I had taken my clothes from a movie and then we had to do promotion of the movie. And so I just changed out the clothes I had with the new version for the promotion. My lawyer called me and she said, Sony called. You have to send back the new versions that you replaced. So there is a risk.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
That's true. You live or die. Yeah. So anyway, so I was on the show for a year and it kind of went under the radar and got canceled.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, we played siblings. Oh, wow. And she was like, I think a year older than me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I guess maybe my brain was just like, you never talked to that person. Okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Like an aloofness. That's so funny. That might seem really attractive. I mean, my wife was my first date and she is so cool and beautiful and amazing. And she was older than me. So I just went up to her like almost as a joke. I was like, would you ever go out with me? And I never said that to a person ever. Oh, wow. Would you go out with me? Would you ever go out with me? It was a joke.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Is she Australian? No, but she could be. She's so pretty. She's as pretty as an Australian. Oh, my God.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
You'd swear she was from Australia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go one look. My wife and I actually dated for like 10 years and we broke up and I did date an Australian. That's what I'm thinking. That was my other girlfriend. Okay. A blonde Australian.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Oh yeah, that's true. She was my first date. My wife wouldn't date me when I was 17. She waited until I was of age. There were like three year period where I couldn't go to a bar and she could go to a bar because I was 18, 19, 20. But I think I had the confidence to ask her out because it seemed so absurd.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
No, she said absolutely not. No. But then she was an assistant to a producer for a few years before she started teaching. And the producer wanted to read my screenplays. I was writing screenplays a lot. And so Anna, my wife, was the intermediary. So she would have to read these things. And so she thought I was funny. And I reminded her of her father, who was like funny Jewish.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Right, right, exactly. Like bullseye. The references are very clear, but you add a T. Or an S, depending. That's right. So then we dated for 10 years. It was great. And now we're married.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I did because it was my wife's degree prior to me. What about you?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I found that very liberating. Me too, especially because you're trying to constantly be a good version of this society, but that in some ways it's a little randomized.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yes, that's a really good point. My wife specifically, she grew up living in different places in Central America and Europe, and she just lives life totally different than anybody I know. She's an activist and she's politically minded, but she's just uninterested in like we just had a presidential election. She's uninterested in all of the numbers of the presidential election.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
She just kind of feels like they're helping people in need. She just doesn't have the sense of the rat race of modern life. Is she less inclined to levy a verdict? She's uncynical. She's never criticized people. She's never, I mean, in 20 years with her, she's never looked over at me and rolled her eyes at something somebody said.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And I'll ask her, like, wasn't that so stupid what that person said? She's like, no, I mean, they're going through a hard time. It probably makes sense within their little sphere of culture. Exactly. And this is the way they exist. It's okay. They have trouble making friends. Just let them say that stuff to you. It's okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Exactly. She's never once uttered the phrase, that was weird. And partly that's, I guess, why I was also able to ask her out. She seems very unjudgmental. She wouldn't think like, wow, no, you're ugly. She'll just take it at face value. And then cultural pluralism is also one of your focuses. Yes. That's because I graduated with a weird degree. The New School has these kind of eccentric degrees.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So it was democracy and cultural pluralism, which was basically an anthropology degree.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
That's you. I was never in acting classes there, but yeah, he ran. Inside the actor's studio. But that was a new school presentation. Exactly. It was. Did you ever go to any of those weird lectures and ask questions? I didn't. I knew them really more from the Will Ferrell parody of them. Do you remember those? Yes. I guess you're young enough that it had already been parodied.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Like it was hard to take that kind of thing seriously. And I was working with actors who were occasionally so pretentious that I was so turned off to that thing. What's the word that you, you know, just this kind of self-important sanctimonious version of actors.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
But now I could see it having also the effect of, oh, wow, this is the real deal. This is the way you're supposed to talk about things. To me, it just seems like self-important pretense as though your job is like more important than any other job in the world.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Is that Noah Baumbach's first directing? I think he had directed other movies that hadn't gotten the same amount of attention.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I don't know how to describe it other than to say so briefly. It's like the kind of thing I've been in things that are popular and been in things that are unpopular. And there's always a little period after the popular things come out where you do have. Yes, I would just call it exactly what you said, a feeling of security.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Oh, I know if I wanted a job in the next six months, I could definitely get one. Yeah, I don't know that it would be great or that I would love it. But I've been involved in so many of these things where something is really liked briefly. And then you go back to the same thing six months later. It's always the case. It's a cycle.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
No, I mean, if anything, like I grew up really liking Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler movies, probably like every other kid on my block and every block in the world. I guess I saw in Ben Stiller, maybe before I noticed Woody Allen, maybe a kindred thing like, oh, I could be in movies as a good role in movies and not have to change too much about myself.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
But no, I never thought like, I'm going to do that because as actors, you know, you have no control over anything. And Also, weirdly, I was really just getting cast in dramas. Zombieland was a comedy, but all the auditions were very dramatic auditions. I was really not getting cast in those comedy things anyway.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Even this movie I did right before Zombieland, Adventureland, was a comedy, but the director wanted to make his bittersweet coming of age story. He didn't want to make a broad comedy. Mottola, right? Greg Mottola.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Well, that's the thing. It really wasn't. It was like Greg's life story in the 80s and this bittersweet thing. But because they build it is exactly what you just said. People were disappointed in it because they thought it would be really funny, like super bad. It's interesting that you ask this and I haven't thought about this in like 20 years.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
But what you just described was I actually thought one thing might happen to me and that's not the thing that happened. I thought I could be in a Long King Polly or something like that. And I'm just not cast in those roles.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
That's the movie I started smoking on that I was told by the prop woman. It was a really nice person who told me that she couldn't believe that I had transgressed so badly in her eyes. But probably what was happening in the back of my mind, I thought this thing is good and that I'm ruining it. And I would have panic attacks all the time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
In fact, anytime I had to do a scene that was one of my audition scenes, I just froze up and I would start saying other lines. And then they told me, we just got Bill Murray to sign on for a day in the movie. Yeah. And I walked away and had another panic attack because I was like, now people are going to see it. And I'm so bad. And I know that Ruben wanted Michael Cera to be in the movie.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Ruben is a good friend of mine, so I could say this comfortably, has no filter and didn't realize that him telling me that he wanted Michael Cera to be in it would make me feel uncomfortable. And also didn't realize that sending me videos of Michael Cera while we were... shooting at night.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So I'd be on my computer and an email with the subject line, Michael Cera funny video would be sent to all the cast.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, he was obsessed with Michael Cera. I'm sure who turned down the movie. I'm sure that's why I got to audition for it in the first place. And so every day I was just thinking, oh, of course you wanted Michael Cera. And I could read the part with Michael's voice in the part way more than I could read it with my own voice. So I just felt like I was every day letting down the movie.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And this was just like a failure because of me. And then I just started having these weird fantasies. Of course, I'm going to go home to visit my wife on a weekend and Michael's going to be there in bed with her like, hey, too late, buddy. And I've since met him. It's funny that he's like the nicest person. He's impossible to dislike.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
But just at the time, I was getting recognized on the street as him all the time to the point where when I said to the people, no, I'm a different person. They was like, yeah, fuck you. You're him. It was a weird thing. I think it's more common to have that than not, because mine was Zach Braff the whole early ride. Thank you for saying that. It is more common than not.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Every time I talk to an actor, it's always, oh, yeah, mine is this person. And I was this for Michael, too.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And he had, I think, told a story publicly about getting recognized at me at a bar or something. And I remember thinking like, That was a fluke. Exactly. Whereas for me, I mean, literally I got cornered in an ATM by somebody aggressive saying like, yes, you are. Yes, you are. And I was like, OK, fine, fine, fine. I am. I am.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And it's just like the weirdest existential crisis to be stuck in this vestibule going, I am the other person. I am the other person. Let's take a picture. One time my sister's friend said, you look like the guy in that movie. I mean, you're obviously like a better looking version of him, but like you look like him. And I remember thinking, oh, that's so interesting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So the objective opinion is that I'm ugly to the point where she apologized for making that comparison. comparison.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I was surprised that my sister's friend even complimented me in the moment.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
How's all that work? I remember I was sent like three scripts that same day and two things were bad, but I auditioned for those two. You know, it's like the nature of being an actor. You just get the parts you get. And I remember that script was, oh my God, this is a great thing to read. And then I just made the tape on my couch in New York and then they gave me the part.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And you got the part on the self-submission. Yeah, it was like a whole thing. It felt like it was like being sent to the CIA because my agent called and they were like, they liked your tape and they're going to watch it again. I was like, okay. Yeah, exactly. They called me out to California and then I met with him for an hour. And David Fincher speaks in a very interesting way.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I was there just waiting for him to say, you got in the movie or you didn't get in the movie. But it was said he was like just telling stories about old Hollywood. And I didn't know what they meant for me because you're sitting there like a 27 year old actor. Like, did I get the job? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they called me later and said, yeah, yeah, you got the part.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So it's a weird thing. You know, it's so strange. Like I've auditioned for things that I haven't gotten into and you audition for them like 10 times and then they meet you. You read with this person and then read with that person and then they'll straighten my hair and make me read again. This happens to me a few times. Straighten my hair so I can see what I look like as a Gentile.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And then you don't get those parts. And then a thing like this comes along and it was just I made a tape at home with my little sister and they cast me. Wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, no, this I didn't. I felt like I was just in the shoes of this person. The anxiety in Zombieland was really I'm an interloper here. They tried to cast somebody else who's definitely funnier than me. I still think definitely funnier than me. And he didn't want to do it. And everybody's disappointed that I show up every day.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
The social network, it just felt like I was prepared for it in a different way. The character was so interesting and socially aloof and cryptic and angry. And this is my comfort zone. And is having the Sorkin dialogue put you immediately halfway there? Yeah, it's so helpful because you know the scene's going to be good either way. You didn't feel like you had to do some heavy lifting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So it felt like, oh, I could just play in my character. Yeah, so often it's not on the page, the thing that we all know everyone's trying to get that day. Exactly. It requires the actors to do some work that they shouldn't be doing. For example, like making certain emotional transitions seem logical when actually they're not in the script.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I don't want to throw Sony at it. Were they selling it as a Zathura branded thing? Great question. I have forgotten. Okay, got it. Yeah, maybe you can have an intern.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I mean, if you're working with great scripts like that, a great director. My experience was, oh, it's easy to be good in this. You get a bunch of takes. The script is amazing. You can't fail.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yes, exactly. Yeah, I joined for 30 seconds to see what it was about.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
The thing you just described is the exact reason I'd be curious. I'm so curious to see what people look like. Just like, what do people grow into? It's so fascinating to think about.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I still haven't seen that. Is it great? It's so great. I'm so curious. It's such a good movie. Okay, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Is it the kind of thing you could say every line to?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Hard, fun? Weird and exhausting. And when I would complain to my dad, my dad would just always say the same thing. It was like, if you have one of these in your life, if you're like in the arts, be so happy. Why are you complaining? And Obama was president at the time. And I was like, I have to go to a weird dinner. My dad was like...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Do you know the president of the United States probably has 17 things a day that he has to do that are not the thing he likes doing? You should be just so grateful that somebody's giving you free dinner and everything. And I remember I was thinking, oh, I shouldn't go to the Academy Awards because awards are stupid. My dad called me and he was like, are you an idiot?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
This industry has given you so much. Of course, go to these things. Yeah. These award shows are basically ways for the industry to celebrate itself and to promote itself. So just go there and be grateful. Now I'm a little more grateful about things rather than trying to resist. Well, just, you know, you're going to feel uncomfortable in all these places you go.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, but also I think in a bubble, they're strange why they pit artists against each other. This kind of teenage poetry thought, you grow out of that stuff. And isn't it all a lie too?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, yeah. That's so intuitive. I even call my mom sometimes, or my wife. What's the difference? I'm... One of those two people tells me, last time you had a good time and you met a friend of yours there and you were funny.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
He's a great actor, but he's not as fun as me at a party. Yeah, there's a charm missing. It's that X factor. So how was hosting SNL in the wake of that? That was so funny. It was like the exact same thing you're describing. I had turned it down 10 times because I did not want to be somebody who had hosted Saturday Night Live because I just felt so embarrassed.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I was like, I'm going to be a person who did it and who would never be asked back. So I was just like, I don't want to have done it. I feel so embarrassing. And then I did the exact same thing that you just said. So instead, I justified it by like,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
no no no because I want people to know me as an actor not as caricature stuff so I don't want to do it so that's why I justified it and then I was really pressured to do it and I was a fan of the show obviously I mean everybody is and it's an insanely unique experience to have on planet earth for a week yeah in fact I don't even really remember lots of it when you're doing the show you're being dragged around by the sweet woman Donna who's changing your costume you literally have no autonomy you're being just taken around to various things and the hours are weird yeah you're kind of in a fever dream the whole week and then it ends right and you try to process it afterwards that's exactly it yeah
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I could tell by your body posture. I just recalled this. Yes, and I remember you were shooting there. And I strolled across this great divide, like a hundred yards. Oh my God, I remember exactly the day. Of course. I just harangued you. That's right. I was doing a reshoot for a movie and you were shooting. I remember exactly where it was. It was towards Jesus Christ.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I'm very intrigued by her. Oh, she's a total unicorn. I mean, she's funnier than almost anybody I've ever met and great dramatic actress. And I will say, knowing her now as a producer, she's so savvy within the film industry.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
We're like on marketing calls with the studio and there's people who've been doing that job for 20 years and they're all amazing, but she just holds court and we're all just sitting there taking notes. And she's somebody who's never marketed a movie. She's just so savvy at every aspect from giving me a note on my script to then marketing to production, everything.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I don't know any of the names of the streets out here. It was by whatever was closer to the street where you enter. Anyway, I totally remember that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
It's hard to describe what the thing is because I haven't seen it in somebody else. It's hard to articulate it. She just seems always right is what it feels like. Everything she says to me is always, oh, yeah, that seems better than what I was thinking.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I think everybody who meets her has that same feeling. And I think everybody who meets her feels like they have that bond. And I was very, very aware of that when we were working together. I was like, I'm her best friend. But also, I think probably everybody feels that way. It's because she's so genuine. You have the sense in her presence like, oh, this is my new best friend. Wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, that's exactly it. They feel in her presence like this is the most comfortable I've been.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
That's my hunch is that she probably pursued you as a friend. She did. I only say this because I didn't want to bother her because I think of her as on another planet. She's also a very busy person, but she would send me text messages like I had put out a book the next year. She'd send me text messages of lines in the book. She would come to all the plays I wrote. She was just very supportive.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I think what it is is that she's like a comedy nerd. And so I was writing comedy essays. She would send me a picture of one of my short stories or something, and she would say, this is my whole life. And she's genuine. Beams give me hiccups. Yeah. Bream gives me hiccups. It's a collection of short stories that I published in there and elsewhere. And she would just send me pages from it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And no one was doing that to me. It's so sweet and flattering. I think she's just like a comedy nerd in addition to being also like a goddess. And so I think that's what it was. So she became interested in the stuff I was writing. And so she would always be the only one who would read my stuff. I mean, more than any other friend. Yes. He believes in you creatively. Yeah. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And so she got my first movie script and she was thinking of starting a production company and she asked if she can produce this as her first movie.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yes, there's no one with my posture that would possibly be in a movie. I remember you were so sweet. Yeah, I was there for one day doing reshoots.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Not really. I just was feeling like I wasn't getting good movie parts for a while. I was always writing plays because I was doing movies that I really liked.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
But so I've had this happy thing where I was acting in movies I really liked, which you're saying went away. I guess that's true. Yeah. And then I was doing plays and it felt great. And then it had been a few years since I'd been in a movie that people really liked.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So I just thought I have to take the thing I've been doing in theater and just move it to movies where I can kind of take control of it a little more. I had written a book for Audible and instead of turning it into a play, which I was going to do, I turned it into a screenplay because I just thought then I could just get in movies. And it truthfully was helpful.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Like I was working with A24, produced it, and it was basically like I'm in with the cool kids again in the movies. Yeah. And I engineered it myself. And now I acted in my second movie. So now it even helps me as an actor. But it was kind of like, I guess, taking a backdoor back to the table that I felt I wasn't sitting at anymore.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Exactly. Now you're opening the car dealership based on the sitcom that you were in.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Now you see these cars. Now you don't. Yes. God, where was I? All now I could think of. Where are we? Directing. Oh, yeah. Oh, this is what I was going to say. Basically, you joke that I was in the gratitude phase. I was not in the gratitude phase. I moved to Indiana. I was in the I moved to Indiana phase. Bloomington, Indiana. I moved to Bloomington. Yeah. What is that? Bloomington is a city.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And cities are groups of people. And you know this from your anthropology that those people can be different. But basically, my wife grew up there. Okay. My mother-in-law tragically got sick and she was running a domestic violence shelter there. And we went to help out with the shelter and to take care of her.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And in terms of professional stuff, because that's kind of what we're talking about, it was like just a total two feet out the door of this thing. you know, it's a weird industry. It feels so unstable. You feel like, oh, the thing's going to spit me out tomorrow. Being in Indiana, I was just around none of it, which was great. Paradoxically, it was weird because I was the only actor there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And so people were like, hey, are you still acting? Sure. Which is not a question you want to be asked.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
This was probably 2016, 17, 18, 19. Pre-pandemic. Yeah, no. And then in the pandemic, we were there all the time. We moved to Indiana. You left, basically. Exactly. And it was a relief. But you're running away from something, too. I was running away from not feeling like I'm pounding the pavement in New York.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Also, I was in this Batman movie and the Batman movie was so poorly received and I was so poorly received. I've never said this before and it's kind of embarrassing to admit, but I genuinely think it actually hurt my career in a real way. Because I was poorly received in something so public. I've been in poorly received things that just don't see the light of day. For the most part, no one knows.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
But this was so public and I don't read notices or reviews or movie press or anything. So I was unaware of how poorly it was received.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah. He just like asked me to hold it, I swear. Yeah. That's interesting. Maybe I was. Maybe I was going through a moment. Did you ever smoke? I've tried to smoke to relieve stress. I tried to take it up and thought like this will help my personality. And it just doesn't. I thought this will calm me. And it does that little trick of you're finally breathing for the first time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Oh, yeah. But in the industry, if you're in a huge, huge movie and not seen as good, the people who are choosing who to put next in their movie are just not going to pick you. Yeah, you're just like associated with something. I love my role and I love the movie doing it and everything. So I feel just myself to blame. I'm not like they did me wrong.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
No, I'm like, oh, I guess I did something wrong there. And so it did feel like I had to climb out again. Yeah, but you were really depressed after that. I was depressing, but I'm depressed all the time. In some ways, just like, oh, yeah, of course, I had this great opportunity. Of course, it didn't go well. Just pessimism.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Because every time I'm in the shitty thing, I do just fine. Oh, no, it's exactly what I expect. My main trouble comes when a good thing is happening because I think now is the really bad thing. And it's that anticipation that's really troubling. Yes. My mother-in-law was very sick. And while we were taking care of her, it's such a self-centered way to view something.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
But I remember I just had never anxiety because I never had a thought about myself. It made me feel so good to be able to help somebody who needed it. During the pandemic, there was no work. Obviously, you couldn't go to set. So I was working in this domestic violence shelter. I was just volunteering. And I'd never been happier in my life. It was just getting outside of yourself.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Oh, that's so nice to ask. The directors I've loved working with are not those people either. They're people like me. And they are great because they're real people who so appreciate everybody who's on that set. They appreciate the actors who are exposing themselves, discounting their own vanity, even though their face is going to be blown up to a million feet. And I just walk in so...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
lucky and happy that this production designer, this cinematographer, this art director is here working. They're far more talented at their job than I am at my job. This is my first or second movie. This is their hundredth. These actors, same kind of thing. So I just feel really lucky. And the two movies I've made are very specific to my voice. And so I'm very confident in the creative part of it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I know where I'm not confident in, and I'm so happy that I have people working with me who are. When I think about it that way, it's pretty easy. My new movie I'm acting in as well. And I never had a chance, for example, to watch the playback of me in the scene. I never had an opportunity. We were moving too quickly for me to go and put my headphones on and watch me act.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
We were taking like deep breaths. I always thought if they can come up with a cigarette that didn't make me nauseous, I'd be a heavy smoker.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
It was basically I could either do that or do another take. It would take the same amount of time. So I just do another take. I was too busy to second guess myself or my hair. I just finished doing Now You See Me 3. And it's an ensemble movie. And the part doesn't require me to like dig deep. And yet still, I was so nervous all the time. This is my shot on this movie.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And this is the important scene in this movie. When I'm doing my own thing, I just don't have that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I got to get these lines out. I wrote. That's my job. But what does it tell you then about the nervousness from the other thing? Does it tell you that's just fantastical stuff that you're creating to fill your mind?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I just find there's so much waiting in movies. You fill your head with crazy stuff. Again, I just finished this movie. Ruben Fleischer actually directed it. It was a big movie and you could not go wrong in this movie. It's Now You See Me 3. And yet you spend the six hours in your trailer waiting to do the thing. And so by the time you get to do the thing and the line is basically just like,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I got him right here. Something like that. And so you're in the trailer and you're like, I got him right here. I got him right here. Because you're thinking this requires so much because I'm here in this trailer.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Exactly. So then you over inflate the importance and then you screw yourself up a little bit because it actually is better if you don't think about it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
You do. Okay. I tried to. And then I also tried to smoke during a movie where I was just feeling so stressful. And then this young assistant prop woman, she was really nice. And we always used to talk and she was very friendly and nerdy. And she thought that we were kindred spirits. And then she saw me smoking one day and she came over to me and she just said, I thought you were different. Oh.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's character based, you know, walk and talk characters that you don't necessarily fall in love with right away. Every scene you set up for, you probably were going to get through four or five pages of dialogue. Yeah. Wait, did your kid not find Kieran to be really funny? Because Kieran's antics are funny in the movie.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah. The house that the guys go to at the end is my family's house. Oh, really? And my wife and I went to all these cities in 2008 when we were just traveling through Poland. So I knew these places quite well. And then my aunt Doris was born and raised in that house. My cousin Maria survived the war through a series of miracles, as we say in the movie.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So it was kind of like a combination of these two people. And then I'd been on some of these tours, not in Poland, but first time my wife and I went away together was to Venezuela. She's like an interested person in the world. She took me when I was 18 to Venezuela and we went on this tour.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And it was so funny because you're with these other Americans or British people, whatever, it's an English speaking tour, and you're not having any local experiences. You're in another place, but you're kind of in this
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
bubble i thought it was so kind of funny and ironic so i wanted to kind of present that world also would be i thought really interesting to just have it set on like a holocaust or so basically the kind of humor of the movie and of the characters can just be offset and against the backdrop of something quite big where do you get that relationship
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And I always felt such shame. You had betrayed. Yes, whatever thing that she had assumed. Because see, that was like a cool guy move. She didn't know that I was feeling deep, genuine anxiety and just trying to do anything to relieve myself. It was before I was taking like antidepressants. I was just trying anything. To regulate. Exactly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I've written about characters like these for a while. Kieran's character is Benji. I played a character named Ben in a play called The Spoils, which was about a similar kind of character. I'm fascinated by people like that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So if you haven't seen the movie, the character that Kieran plays is this incredibly charming, charismatic, live wire firecracker, but can also be very manipulative, antagonistic, intimidating, but also lovable and then also ultimately very broken. Something is very disturbed.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, exactly. And I guess I've found... People like that just to be initially very enviable. Like, I wish I had that kind of outward charm. I wish I could say what was on my mind. I wish I felt comfortable enough in my own skin to even say, hey, I'm feeling really bad now. He gives people the greatest moment in their lives.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
But he also when he's not feeling good, he decides he has to turn everybody's world sour. I always thought that's like the version of me that I don't present. Well, that's what I was going to ask.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
You're the first person to put it in those Freudian terms, but that's what it is. So Kieran's like the id. My character is David. Everything David is feeling and all the things that are coursing through his unconscious come to life. And that's Kieran's character. And there's something unsustainable about Kieran's character.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So that's why there's a kind of broken, bittersweet quality to him because he doesn't have a sustainable life. He can't. keep jobs or friends or girlfriends. You meet him in the beginning at the airport and you leave him at the end at the airport. He's a person who kind of exists in this transient liminal space, just a purgatory of his own troubles.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Which of course would just bring them down even further. There's like a quote in every culture that has the following thing. Japanese culture, it's like rice patties to rice patties in three generations. There's another quote, which is like first generation builds the house, second generation lives in the house, third generation burns it down.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And it occurred to me after she said that, that, oh, right, maybe it doesn't work on me anyway. Well, I don't want you to say that, but okay. I do.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Italian is like shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. And I say it in the movie, the first generation because some menial job, they work themselves up into the middle class. Second generation maybe moves themselves up a little further in the third generation, burns the house down.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And I think that third generation, if I were to analyze it, maybe on a mass level, I would say something along the lines of there is a guilt that their lives are comfortable and they're lacking meaning that the first generation had.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
exactly what the movie is talking about. I don't know how to reconcile it. I've written four plays about this exact idea because all my plays are about usually an American, modern American creation, like what you're just describing in touch with somebody whose life is somehow just more fraught. The play that I like the most is called The Spoils.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And my character is like Kieran's character and his roommate is a Nepalese immigrant who's based on my friend. We both met at NYU, but my roommate is getting a business degree. And I think business degrees are ridiculous because capitalism is bullshit. And he's like an upwardly mobile immigrant. And it's just this clash of cultures.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And so my life is just completely stifled because everything seems like bullshit because I have the comfort to have that. It's a luxury. Yeah, exactly. You get self-hating. And then if you're telling yourself this story of God, I can't believe my grandfather, what you just told me now. And you're worried about your role. It just adds to the self-hating cycle.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Which helps dissipate some of the shame. It's the thing you said earlier about not going to the award show and then creating a thing in your head. Yeah, because award shows are bullshit. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You have to if your life is not working out in certain areas, the quicker thing to do is not try to fix it or blame yourself or try to fix yourself.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
The quicker thing to do is create some really well-reasoned, logical sounding argument of why the thing that you didn't get is bullshit.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
The idea of Maslow's hierarchy of needs is that once you fulfill food and air, then you have shelter. And if you're worried about your movie role, I suppose that's not even on the pyramid. And if it was on the pyramid, it'd be the star on top of the Christmas tree of the pyramid. Yeah, the tip of the flagpole. And Maslow would punch you in the face. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
That's what the movie is doing. And that's what the characters in their own different ways are trying to go back to connect to it in some ways. My character is kind of a yuppie and has all the feelings of OCD. It makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I don't want to tell anybody about it because I'm grandson of survivors. Right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
You know what? That's very savvy of you. And as I get older, I start thinking more along those lines. Maybe I've kind of self-defined in a way that's actually maybe not the most.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, we filmed at a concentration camp. We filmed at one called Majdanek, which is five minutes from where my family lived. Not the house that's in the movie, but my second cousins lived nonetheless. We filmed at this place, Majdanek. It was really difficult to film there. They don't want movies filming there for obvious reasons. I mean, most movies...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
that are about the Holocaust take place during the Holocaust. These places that are hallowed grounds don't want extras and Nazi uniforms running through. So I took eight months to get in touch with these people to finally express to them what I wanted to do, which was I wanted to take these characters on a tour through this place, which is now kind of called a museum.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
The way that they, as a museum, are hoping to get people to come in, too. The movie was serving the same purpose as the place and important to go. I've been to a few of these genocide museums in Rwanda and Cambodia, and I visited several of the concentration camps. Every time I'm at these places, I just have this thought, which is like, God, everybody has to see this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And it's hard to say exactly why. I guess, you know, it'll make you more empathic.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
That's right. I mean, and I guess it speaks to the thought that one death is a tragedy and a genocide is data. So when you go there, you realize, oh, actually, there's something real here. It's not something to just write off as a data point of something that occurred.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
It's the greatest book of all time. The first chapter is the Prussian Blue. It's called Prussian Blue. Sorry, I forgot the title. That is the single greatest book I've ever read, but I read it like five years ago and I just bought it for everybody I know.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Is that what it is? He was living in South America, but he's French. That Prussian Blue chapter is the eeriest thing I've ever read in my life.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
There's something so weird about it. And you know, it's also the name of a girl band. Do you know about this? Oh, no. Prussian blue. White supremacist two sisters. Oh, my God. Ladies, ladies. It's the wrong use of Prussian blue. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, you're exactly right. Why is that? Because America doesn't want to go to a movie. I want my cake and eat it too. But what's the appeal?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
It must have cost $100 million. I see. I see. I see.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
There are occasionally movies that the story of the thing is $50,000 and they did this. But that's, I guess, few and far between, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Disney Plus, I think it comes on. Yes. OK, great. Imagine it's the only Holocaust movie on Disney Plus.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
You know, all these movies, the parents die in the beginning.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
That's the formula. Yeah. Isn't that just bizarre? It is. And when it's pointed out to you, you're like, oh, it's that simple.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
You know what ChatGPT told me? Because I asked, is this exploiting kids' psychology? And it said, no, this is a way to safely teach kids about emotions. So it's not real, but you're dealing with emotions. They're playing out their biggest fear. They'd lose mom and dad. That's right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
That would be great. Thank you so much. This was so nice.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately. There's a line in Manhattan where he goes, I don't smoke because it gives you cancer, but I look so incredibly handsome with a cigarette in my mouth.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, exactly. But I guess I feel that way anytime I'm going in reverse. But also, just like you'd stop at these campsites, I'd travel with my family and I would have to unhook the thing. And I would always be asking for help. I was always just like the campsite's little brother, just asking for help. Everybody, can you show me how to use this tool that I carry around for some reason? Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Oh, 100%. I mean, it flooded in Minnesota in the deep, deep winter. And of course, the thing would freeze and break if I didn't do anything about it. And luckily, mechanics, they saw me in a movie. It was the only reason I got to get in there. You think the big thing's buying the item. Oh, no, my friend.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, exactly. I mean, there were just mice in the inside of the airstream. Not on the inside of the airstream, on the inside of the inside of the airstream. Within the two walls.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
And they get the peanut butter. What did you find? Just bits of foam chewed up everywhere and turds? I took it into a place and they said, yes, they had eaten the entire inner foam lining of the thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
They love eating plastic. Is that what it is? Are they actually eating? They're eating and spitting it out.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
These things are not food. No, but they thrive on it. Yeah, they really do. We're currently trying to sell it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Well, this is a great place to offer it. We've made a great pitch for the product, I think. My wife was just asking the school moms if anybody knows anybody, but this is a far wider reach. Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, exactly. Is there an info?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Please in the comments, what's year and the size? 2017 16-foot Bambi Sport. Beautiful. I would say good condition, but now you know. Yeah, riddled with mice. Yeah, I was going to say never had mice, but now you know. But I got it. I fixed it up. It's mint condition. That's gorgeous. So is it info at armchairexpert.org? Yes, that's exactly right. And just give me a number.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
I don't want to have to start going through a whole thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Where do you keep this? I live in New York, so I keep this on my mother's lawn in New Jersey. Okay. And so when you guys want to go on a trip, you drive. Do you rent a truck or do you own a truck? During the pandemic, I bought my very first car, which was just a Jeep Cherokee. I never had a car because I'm in New York. Then I gave it to my sister, so I don't have the car anymore either.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So I have to go to my sister's, get the car. Then I have to drive to my mom's. So it's a great way to visit your whole family. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Yes, is a good question. I'm confident. My dad was a taxi driver in New York right before I was born and he taught me how to drive. And so I guess the word would be cocky. OK, arrogant, arrogant driver, fearless to a dangerous degree.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Why don't I use that as the real me and smoke a cigarette out the window of my Jeep? Spit tobacco out the windows. Yeah, exactly. You have a piss jar like in crazy. Monica's shaved head blowing in the wind. Oh, fucking. Exactly. Riding on the roof. One side of her head blowing in the wind, the other side having a sheer breeze. This is a good movie. This is Monica and Jesse go wild.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Well, you're in luck because it's the same physical right now. Yeah, we went to New Jersey when I was five years old and then I grew up in the suburbs. But I left when I was 18. So I got my license at 19. So this explains the driving situation here.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Not really. What happened was I was starting acting and then I also was going to a high school in New York City. And so I was taking the bus into New York City every day from New Jersey to go to high school. And I was around no one driving. OK, right. So like I was only around city kids. In fact, I had to use a fake address to be there was a city public school.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
This is the performance art senior year. Yes. Yes. Every time you reference anything, I'm going to be in shock. I want you to pace yourself, though. I think I could sustain the same level of interest.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
Wait, sorry, what's happening? It's the greatest day of your life, despite the information I give you. This is the, wait, you mean it's like the greatest day and then I go to the doctor?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
So my whole lung is this other thing. Yes. This is incredible, you know, because I have not seen an episode of The Wire and I keep promising myself if I ever find myself bedridden, if I get the flu or in this case, obviously, it's something much more long term. I'll finally.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Jesse Eisenberg
It takes a minute for the writing to set in. That's fine. Obviously, I have the time. And is the right lung OK? Because I've also not done Breaking Bad. No.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
It's the equivalent of if you don't do all the push-ups, everybody in this room has to do 10 more. That's insane. You know what I mean? Yeah. And giving me ideas. No, no, no, no.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all that stuff. Listen, that was her wound and now she's an artist too, that bus driver. And an amazing athlete.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
And that was her will to power. Yeah, I was just I was a miserable, miserable kid with good parents. I feel uncomfortable saying this in public because I don't like demonize my well-meaning good parents and good parents. Yeah, I don't know. I was just like wired to be absolutely miserable. And, you know, performing for me was kind of like an outlet, but not like an outlet like I feel myself here.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
It was more just an outlet to literally just get out of school. Like if I got into a show, it meant I could leave early from school on various days and rehearse and be with adults, which was the only place at the time I felt like a comfortable.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
And there's a calm that might come with that. Yeah, exactly. And not only a calm, but like catharsis because the characters are emotional. And it's like the thing I feel all the time bubbling under my surface, but is inappropriate to do in public, you know, to have like an emotion or, you know, and also it's a burden on other people, of course.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
So I don't emote in public, but like to have that catharsis, you know, is really helpful. you weren't just drawn to acting, specifically musical theater. Well, that was like the thing that was like available. Like they weren't doing the seagull in, you know, community theater, New Jersey, you know. They were doing the musical version of it. Yeah, exactly. I've got to go and commit suicide.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Everybody had jazz wings. But so, you know, so that's just like what was happening in children's theater at the time where I lived. You know, now I see a wonderful chasm between me and musical theater in terms of like performance style. That's not where I would shine these days.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Yes. Wow. Yes, exactly. You know, I was like at a KOA, like a campsite, you know, where we stayed overnight. Right, right. And the KOA is known for a lot of things, but not the Wi-Fi. So, yeah, it was pretty bad. Yeah. Sorry about all that.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, long story short, it caught up with us. Yeah, caught up with a lot of us. Yeah. Yeah.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Are there people who are immune to it? Like, actually? I have no idea. I thought I was a mutant. Yeah, of course you must have. And you were around people, right, who of course had it.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
I adore him. I get it. I love him. He is an icon and in some ways emblematic of what we think of as, for me at least, Americana. We were working together for the last four months up until last week. We just finished doing a movie in Budapest together, Now You See Me 3. It was our sixth project together. And I still have that feeling that he transcends the species somehow. I don't know... It is.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
The way I've been able to codify him in my mind just recently is the following. He is a truly eccentric artist masquerading as an everyman. Yes, I really think so. He's actually an eccentric artist with very unusual taste, but like he's just been embraced. And I think it's not by his own decision or intent, like by America as like the person we can all agree on.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
They're great. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. But Woody has a special cultural thing, too, because he has a Midwestern, he has a Southern twang and a Midwestern charms. He grew up in Ohio and Texas. And so there's something culturally, I think, also a little confusing because he's also hippie and, you know, he has a weed store down the block here. Yeah.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
So there's like, I think there's so many wonderfully contradicting things happening that we all feel he's with us.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
A week later, we were shooting a movie in Budapest. That was like right after that. Oh, was it right? Yeah.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
He was just laughing in my face. Okay, to be fair, he doesn't know fractions. So...
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
I mean, it's worth everything. It makes it all worthwhile. Let me ask you this, though. Like, how much eccentricity do you think is manufactured by people trying to be? Interesting.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
But but but but what what they'd be doing would be compromising potentially being liked. And when do those two things come into conflict in a way that still makes them demanding? Right. I mean, I wish I can answer the question. I just have seen it a million times. Right. And it always feels like it's coming from the same place of needing to feel externally important because something is missing.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Do you know what I mean? Well, some stuff is made up. I mean, the cell phone tower, you know?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
That doesn't even exist. What if it's just you and Flea who own this houseboat? That's what it's going to be. That's cool too, though.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
When Jesse and I get a houseboat, which is going to happen, Jesse, we're going to live there together. Oh. Yeah. If you have the houseboat, why would you not live there all the time? Even when you have to go visit your families back home, you stay in the houseboat in Amsterdam.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Oh, thanks. It's really beautiful. Yeah, it's funny because I hadn't like really seen his work ever. I mean, really, I just had this instinct that there was no one else on the planet who could do it. I met him at an audition for this movie Adventureland. I was already cast in the movie and he came in to audition for it. And in the audition, he like literally grabbed my nipples and twisted them.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
It was in the script. In the script, he was supposed to, like, punch me in the balls. And a lot of actors are coming in and no one touched me that day because it was auditions, you know what I mean? And, like, and yet Kieran punched me in the balls and then grabbed my nipples, twisted them, and was so brilliantly funny in the audition that he didn't even get the role.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
But he actually wasn't cast, but I remember he left.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
And Screen Actors Guild, they do take you back after... after after a probatory period. But anyway, no, but basically, like he he he left the room and the director and I turned to each other was like, that was unbelievable. This guy is amazing. And that was like in 2009, I think.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
And I just had this image, I think, in my unconscious or this feeling of being around a guy who's so funny, who's so magnetic and who doesn't kind of give a shit about At that point, like being polite or being like the obsequious auditioning actor of like, you know, so happy to be here. And a guy who just immediately manhandled me. And it's kind of what the movie is like in the movie.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
But there's also, it's real. It's very meaningful. That's so nice of you to say. And actually, the original script was set in Mongolia. I was like 30 pages into the script of these two guys going to Mongolia to visit an old friend. You're the new Hope and Crosby. That's that. You're going to do travel, you know. Look it up, kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a really good reference.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Next week, we're going to the Orient, you know. But... It was basically like, uh, it was, um, yeah, that it was. And so like, I had this great dynamic and then the movie, this Mongolia script was not going well. And this is kind of funny, but like the script was not going well. I was 30 pages into the script and an ad popped up on the internet for Auschwitz tours.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
And then in parentheses with lunch. Jesus. Yeah. That's what it said. Auschwitz parentheses with lunch. Auschwitz tours. Auschwitz tours. Yeah. With lunch. Yeah. With lunch. With, I know I'm getting it. I know. Should I say it again? I can come closer. Yeah. So basically, and I was like, first of all, I knew immediately what the ad was for.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
I mean, but the implication of what the ad was for, which was just, you know, you want to do tours. The ad's a little tone deaf. Let's say you can mention with lunch, maybe elsewhere. Yeah. Maybe put an asterisk there and address the asterisk after you click the banner.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
But basically, but actually what they're appealing to is exactly why the tone deaf, why the ad is tone deaf, because they're appealing to yuppies who want to instead of going to Rome this this this holiday. Now you're going to go to Auschwitz, you know, and you're doing your responsible tourism, which is a good thing to do anyway. But.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
As soon as I saw that, I took the characters out of Mongolia and I set them on this Polish trip. But that was really the feeling. It's like you could drop these characters in anywhere, in any scene, and it will still be amusing. And so, like what you said, they're going to all of these places fraught with the history of trauma.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
And yet the characters have an appealing bond that you can kind of just repeat and further uncover.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Yes. I've thought about this so much, not just because of making the movie, but because I do the same kind of tourism. I've been to the Rwandan Genocide Museum in Kigali and in Cambodia that, you know, killing fields. I'm fascinated with this kind of tourism. And yes, there's always the weird part of it. Like we have to get lunch on the way there.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Do we get bad lunch because bad things happened here? Right. Or do we get the lunch we like because we want to have the energy to tour this place? And it's so weird. So in the movie, the characters are like kind of trying to reconcile that disconnect, this necessary disconnect. Like we're on the train going to a concentration camp and we have first class tourists.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
seats because the you know exchange rate in poland allows for us to have this you know we're on a yuppie tour of poland and uh kieran's character cannot stand the fact that we're in first class but like coach is not that much better you know what i mean no he goes he's you know he's saying our people were put on trains in poland in this terrible situation to be killed right uh
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Yes, but also what if you did also have this kind of residual guilt that other people didn't have the sandwich and your moldy sandwich is not something to even have pity for. You know what I mean? Like there could be a version of you that goes like, oh my God, yeah, you're right. I'm feeling bad over something I haven't earned. You know? Yes.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
I mean, my family. I'm telling you, I'm not asking you. I'm just telling you that Poland is important to you. Are there any other countries I should look into as being important? You're also into Guam. Okay. Okay, so protectorates, yes. Yeah.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
But I mean, I know that that's something that this is reflects part of your life. Yeah, exactly. Like the house we filmed the movie at, but at the characters wind up at the end of the movie is the house my family lived in up until 1939. And yeah, my wife and I kind of took this trip, but not on like a guided tour and went to all these cities.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
And all the stories that the characters tell are basically just stories from my family. I just, you know, insert them in these kind of, you know, fictionalized ways. Are you, is it right that you're trying to get Polish citizenship? Yes, I have a social security number in Poland, but I don't have my passport. Can you say it right now? Yeah, it's 17, and then the rest are Polish characters.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
So it doesn't translate. It's 17ZWZWCZW. Yeah, scammers, try and use that. Yeah. But I haven't got my passport. I was supposed to get my passport on Wednesday at the next Wednesday, like in several days, a few days from now at the Polish embassy in D.C. And then I was just emailed last night. You're not getting it there. And so I don't know. I've been like chasing this thing for a while.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
There's always another Conan O'Brien out there. And you could do it remotely. Exactly. Ireland has many wonderful studios. In a van, just like you. Yeah, exactly.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
That's pretty amazing. Were you surprised that the feeling snuck up on you? Yes, I was. Whenever I have any kind of emotion, I am shocked and dismayed. Was it something specific? Like, did you think, oh, that man would have looked at this?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
I had like a similar experience to you. I'm like really always on the edge of emotions and maybe you're not. And so I think I had almost like the x-ray inverse of your experience. I went to this house. Again, we filmed this movie there, but 2008, my wife and I went to this house that my family was from.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Not like Ireland. It basically is Candyland. Oh, let's come to Gumdrop Mountain. Not those gross views. Look at all those inedible views. Anyway, nonetheless, there's... Poland, better than Ireland. In terms of the views you can eat. But basically like, so my wife and I went to this house and I knew so much about the house and forgive me for like taking this and- That's okay, go for it.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Like, forgive me for taking this in like kind of like a, you know, bleak direction. But you know, what happened in the house was like my family owned this dry goods store on the corner of this town square in this nice, very nice town in Poland. And they were friends with the Poles. I mean, I know this from, cause I'm, they're survivors. they were really good, well-liked in the town.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
And in 1939, they were taken out of their house. They were taken to the cemetery, which is like two blocks away, and they were shot, like point blank. And then, you know, we actually parked our trailers when we were shooting there outside the cemetery. So this whole town was kind of fraught with not only memories that I had. Let me put it this way.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
In 2008, I went to this house, and I expected to have very much the experience you just described, that I would be overwhelmed with this feeling of catharsis and a kind of like...
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
immediately uh you know resonant feeling of connection and um i really didn't and what was interesting like about that strange disconnect for me was like i just had this feeling of like oh yeah we don't belong here anymore you know um and uh uh that was kind of depressing and like i was standing out there for a while like with my wife and then we're just basically loitering you know in front of this building in this town square and i just had this feeling of oh right i i
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
none of us are here anymore. And then I had this other weird feeling is when I was going into that town, I guess I assumed I would see people that look like me. And I didn't. And, you know, there are no Jews left in the town. And so it was this weird thing. It was an emptiness I was left with, not the catharsis that I was expecting to have.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Hi, my name is Jesse Eisenberg, and I feel... unconflicted, maybe for the first time in my life about something, but in this case about being Conan O'Brien's friend. That's so sweet. Yes.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
I didn't know. It's a speaking fee. I'm treating this like a state college.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
That's so nice of you to say. Thank you for always being supportive of me.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
I don't know. You only bought the Jimmy Stewart AI voice. We all just get, we all get.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
I just love the idea that Jimmy Stewart's from anywhere like Poland. Yeah.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
But I will say, like, just to that point, I remember right after I was so first of all, I grew up watching. Oh, maybe. Sorry. I grew up like obsessed, obsessed, obsessed with you to the point where, like, literally my mom would sneak out after my dad fell asleep to go into my bedroom to watch your show with me. And so your dad's not a fan. This is how my mind works. Why did he hate me? Yeah. Huh.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Well, my new worst enemy, Barry Eisenberg of East Brunswick, New Jersey.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
But anyway, yes, he's the only one that truly knows. But anyway, like after we did the segment on your on your show, you leaned over to me and you said you seem like such a nice person. And I remember it was so odd because that. It doesn't seem like one of the compliments you get in the entertainment industry. It doesn't seem like one of the boxes you might check. You know, you're a nice person.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
That is so nice of you to say. Thank you so much. Do you ever root for mean people?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
Of course, perhaps even more so because you don't want them to hurt you. Exactly.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
the exact same kind of confusion as you do and the exact same conversations with therapists as you've had. I always think, yeah, there was like maybe a parallel universe version of me that was kind of happy and is an accountant. And so, but, you know, the painful thing is the thing that person told you is, no, you didn't need that.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
And that's even worse, you know, because then it was just for nothing. It was a waste of time. I just feel like we got into jobs that no one was asking us ever to do. Like, no one wanted you to host a TV show. No one asked me to be an actor. They still... They still... Retroactively trying to... Still, people are trying to like, can we delete that 30 years of work?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
You would cry. That's right. And they had to kind of come up, well, you tell me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So no, I would cry. I cried every day when I got to school, but they didn't want me to cry on the bus. The bus driver did not want me to cry because I guess it was probably dangerous for me to be weeping in the back of a huge moving vehicle. But basically- I don't see why that's a danger.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Jesse Eisenberg Returns
I would use her sleeve as a tissue. Okay. Basically, so, no, right. So she set up this system where if I didn't cry every day until Friday, on Friday she would give out Tootsie Roll Pops to all the kids on the bus if I made it through the week without crying on the bus. And so you would hear on Fridays from down the street, windows open on the bus, don't cry, Jesse. Don't cry, Jesse.