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.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And I love that story so much, which is why I based a character on him in the movie, because that story speaks to the way that we can take kind of horrific experiences that have happened to us because of our religion or race or ethnicity or whatever you want to qualify Jews as and have it connect to other people's horrific experiences.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And we can take this kind of, let's say, historical trauma experience and have it be able to kind of transcend our own community's pain and allow it to connect us to other pain.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
So I dropped out of Hebrew school when I was like 12, right before I was having just my own problems. And also I hated in a real way these parties that people had. I grew up in the suburbs of Jersey. Oh, the bar mitzvah parties? And they turned my stomach in a way that I couldn't probably even articulate.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
You know, just like the deification and celebration of a 13-year-old kid, you know, for doing what, I don't know. And then like the karaoke celebrating a kid. It just, it seemed so gross to me. And like the kids in school would talk about the checks they got from the, it just, it nauseated me. I don't know why. I'm sure because I was probably like a depressed little 12-year-old.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
So like that stuff just seemed so gross. Yeah. You know, in retrospect, I still feel a little put off by it. Like, why are we celebrating this kid and giving them the, you know, kind of false illusion that they've done some great deed for the world by learning seven seconds of Hebrew and finishing school? To me, it kind of, like, still turns my stomach culturally.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
But I dropped out of Hebrew school, you know, and then... Goodness, what would it have been like probably 10 years later? I was acting in a movie playing a Hasidic Jew in a movie called Holy Rollers. And so I was doing all this research on Hasidism. And I actually got a bar mitzvah because I was kind of like going to this Hasidic school.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And I was kind of pretending like I was just a kind of curious secular Jew, which they, of course, loved to have because they thought they can kind of. you know, convert me into, you know, their world. And so they gave me a bar mitzvah. So it was at the, it's called the 770. It's on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. It's like the big Hasidic school in New York. And so they gave me a bar mitzvah.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
So not only did I not have like a kind of secular Jersey bar mitzvah, but I ended up having like a Hasidic bar mitzvah with like a hundred Hasidic young men standing around me, chanting and rapping the tefillin on me. So I had like probably the most religious bar mitzvah a person could have. But it was just because I was like trying to infiltrate this school to learn about it for an acting job.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
No, because I really thought, I don't know, I take my work really seriously. So, like, I was thinking, like, I want to make sure this part is accurate and authentic. I mean, you know, not really. Yeah, no, because I'm like, what is the downside? Like, I'm not, you know, hurting them in any way. I am a secular Jew and I am curious about it.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
I wasn't, you know, I wasn't trying to, you know, steal their styrofoam cups of coffee. I was just trying to, like, learn about their things so I can present it accurately in a movie. And I wanted to play my character with as much respect as I possibly could.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
You know, Grandma never pitied herself. In fact, she always told me she was grateful for her struggle. Well, that's just it. What she endured, that gave her hope, right? Yes. In fact, she used to tell me that, like, you know, first-generation immigrants work some, like, menial job. You know, they drive cabs, they deliver food.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Second generation, they go to good schools and they become, like, you know, a doctor or a lawyer or whatever. And the third generation lives in their mother's basement and smokes pot all day. She said that?
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
I didn't have a calculated reason, but I had just like had written these two characters kind of before. You know, just like kind of trying to figure out, you know, what's behind the most charismatic person in the room? You know, what happens to them when they go home? Why are they acting that way? These are people that I've... feel very envious of, you know, the people who can light up a room.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
I am a performer and I have my own amount of extroversion, but like, you know, I kind of like just sit in awe and envy of people who can like walk into a room and immediately, you know, light it up. And so I was trying to kind of explore what's behind somebody like that because I envy them, but I also know there's something maybe happening there that I wouldn't want. I wouldn't want to trade.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Thank you so much. What an honor to be on your show.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Yeah, I mean, it's probably, you know, God, I don't know what my actual official diagnosis is of my insurance forms. But yeah, it's like, you know, I have OCD, depression, anxiety, that kind of stuff. And it changes and is like emphasized based on what's happening in my life, you know. But as I talk about in the movie, I feel my pain is unexceptional.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Yeah, I guess so. But, you know, one of the other things about like being in the arts is learning to be flexible and learning to feel like Kieran Culkin in this movie didn't want to stand on any marks, which means, you know, when you're setting up a shot in a movie, the actor has to stand on their mark to deliver their lines. This is like kind of just standard practice. Kieran...
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
would never stand on a mark because he didn't know what he was going to do or where he was going to walk or what he was going to be performing like. And so for me, if I had, you know, some kind of strict compulsion to wanting the actors to all do my thing, the movie wouldn't be good because it would be stifling our, you know, leading character, Kieran. And so learning to be flexible is helpful.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And in the arts, that's really kind of... paramount, you know, because you want the most creative, interesting idea to win. So when I'm writing the script, I have, I guess you could call it some kind of compulsion to make sure everything is exactly what I want it to be.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
But I've learned, this is my second movie as director, but I've also written and performed in several plays, that being flexible or being open to being flexible, at least, is probably the best way to get the best version of something.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Yeah, like the first few days, yeah, he told me, like, that's not what I want to do. I don't want to get notes from you. I don't want to rehearse or talk about the scenes. I was just panicked that he wasn't going to know his lines because he speaks so quickly in the movie and it has to go quick. Like, the movie wouldn't work if he's kind of stumbly with his dialogue.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
So I was just worried he wouldn't know his lines. But he's some kind of genius because... He would come to set in the morning and he would say, what scene are we shooting today? Which is like not the question you want to hear from your main actor. And I would say, it's the five-page scene on the train. You have two monologues that have to be delivered at lightning speed.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And he would go, oh, God, I remember that scene. It was so funny. Can I see the script? I'm like, oh, my goodness. I show him the script. He looks at it. Terry, I'm totally... I'm being completely serious. He looks at the script for, like, a minute, and he's word perfect.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
He just has some kind of weird memory bank where he's able to learn lines really, really quickly and then forget about them the next day. So he was always great. And, you know, for me, you know, trying to direct him, it just felt like the movie's going to be great if I let him kind of run around. You know, I don't like...
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
dialogue improvisation, but if I can let him just be free and spontaneous, the movie will really soar. And the movie benefits from that because the movie really is kind of like my perspective on my cousin. And it really works nicely when he is as hard to grasp for the audience as he is for me.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Well, yeah, I mean, actually, it was even more explicit than what you mentioned. It was at Auschwitz tours with lunch. So, right, so I was writing this movie that took place in Mongolia. It was about similar kind of characters, David and Benji, the characters Kieran and I play in this movie. But it was set in Mongolia, and it was just not going well.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
You know, I cried like everywhere. And I guess at some point I probably shed the embarrassment that most kids would have probably felt. I was kicked out of preschool before that because I locked my mom in the closet because I didn't want to be away from my mom.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Yeah. And I – so I probably at some point got over the probably expected humiliation a kid would have about kind of being very emotional in front of people. It's kind of weird to think that that's my job now. Like I'm kind of like on sets with a lot of oftentimes very, you know, tough people, you know, like crying in front of them, you know, in the movie or whatever.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And like I didn't want like attention or pity. I think I was just like so miserable. I couldn't control myself. And I think – I probably just whatever got over that. I don't know.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, my teacher, when I get to school, my teacher was, you know, I'm actually sorry. She was a nice, very such a nice person. But, you know, she even told me one day, Jesse, I had a bad weekend. Do not cry today. And I remember just like desperately trying to stifle it because she had a bad weekend.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
I mean, and sorry, it sounds like I'm presenting my teacher in a negative light. She was great. And I, goodness, I can't imagine what it's like to teach a kid who's weeping every day. But I remember that pretty distinctly. And
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Yeah, I mean, then, like, I had real more emotional problems in sixth grade, and my parents were trying to take, like, a, you know, I, like, because I missed a year of school because I couldn't be there and all that, and, like, you know, my parents were trying to kind of do both things of trying to, like, be sensitive to me while at the same time, like, trying to... Yeah, absolutely.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And then an ad popped up online for Auschwitz tours with lunch. And I just thought, you know, well, first, like, I must be the target demographic for that advertisement. But also... Like, it was just so profound in its simplicity. It spoke to so many awkward modern things, which is just like, you know, we want to tour sites of horror and, you know, kind of wonder, like, why do we want to do that?
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
You should really just be going to school. And the more kind of like we as a family like allow you to like escape all the things that scare you, like the worse you'll get. And he was right because like they pushed me back to school in seventh grade and seventh grade was better for me.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And I got better by just kind of like, let's say, just like normalizing rather than kind of like indulging in escaping.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
crazy it was so crazy I was really going crazy I mean I tried to take the scissors out of the woman's desk and hurt her I don't know I was going crazy so they kept bringing me to this like padded room or something and like it was terrifying and I couldn't go in my room like so I would sleep on the couch I don't know why they let me sleep on the couch in like the TV room thing it was terrifying like and I would go to the soft room and they would like put their knee in my back and hold me back to restrain me and
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
It was just crazy. And it was like a swastika carved into my room. It was not directed to me at all. I'm sure carved in by a kid. I don't think it was probably even anti-Semitically driven. I think it was just like a kid being bad in a place where they have a pen and a wall.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And so, like, once my family was able to come back for, like, visiting day, I was, like, telling them, I can't be here, I can't be here, I'll do better, I'll do better, I'll try it, please, I'll do anything, I'll go to school, I'll do whatever. And they were, like, not having it. And then I, like, I think I may have mentioned, like, there was a swamastika on the wall.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And that, for my mom, was like, ooh, that's not good. Like, but it, for whatever reason, was the thing that tipped my parents into, like, taking me out of there. And I was going home, and I was like, I think I should skydive. Like, I had this feeling on the way home, like, I just love life. I was kissing the car, and... I was kissing my sister's arm hair.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
I mean, I was only in there for like a week. And then like, you know, after, you know, a week or two being out, then you're like, you go back to the same problems.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
But the problem for me was like, if I didn't at least try to go to school, not to go to class, but to try to go to school and sit in like the therapist's office at least for like three hours a day, then the feeling was like, well, then I have to go back to the institution.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
So the institution became this kind of boogeyman of like, that's where I have to go if I'm not going to at least try to sit in the school building for three hours a day.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Yeah, that's interesting. You know, I'm also shy. Yeah, I don't know, but I think that more has to do with...
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
When I'm in groups of people that are very happy, I think probably like a lot of people in the arts, you know, you go to these, like, parties because you're celebrated for your art thing, and you feel so out of place at these parties because you just see people happy and laughing, and you just think, like, the world is so much more miserable than you're behaving right now. Like...
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
You're behaving like the day before Rome fell or something. Like, don't you know what's happening? And so I think a lot of people in the arts are sensitive people who, like, mine their own emotional lives to be in the arts.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And then, of course, the great irony is that then when they are succeeding in the arts, they're brought into all these worlds that were the thing that made them so uncomfortable that they got into the arts in the first place. And that's certainly...
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
One of the experiences I'm having now, because my movie is being celebrated and well-received, and I find myself in these places and amongst groups of people that were my impetus for making a movie about people struggling with their own trauma versus the Holocaust. So there's some kind of irony there, and it certainly sums up probably a lot of my inner life.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
What are we doing when we're doing that? And then also we want to maintain the creature comforts that we have in our lives. So that's the with lunch part. And so, you know, I clicked on the ad, and it took me to a site for, you know, what you would imagine English-speaking –
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
But even more than that, it was just being around adults. But being with adults who are all attracted to the arts, and especially when you're working on the community theater level, it's all people that feel outcast in every other part of the world. And that's why they're working, you know, after their job at AT&T during the day, they come and, you know, they have their outlet at night.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And just being around people like that was just amazing. so life-changing and affirming and made me realize, you know what, I think I'm going to be okay when I'm an adult. Because I could see all these people are more like me. They're not like the people I go to school with. These people are outcasts and weirdos and artists. And that just was like, it was, you know, life-changing.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
heritage tour of Poland that culminates at Auschwitz and it was just so interesting just like posed all these interesting philosophical questions like you know why do we do tragedy tourism and why don't we try to connect to this kind of history in a way that feels less you know comfortable
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Still. I mean, it's still amazing. Like, you know, when Kieran and I were working on A Real Pain together, like, we had this unbelievable, like, on-screen comfort with each other. Like... Because we were playing these two characters that were kind of like well-defined and we liked our roles. And so it felt like I was – it felt like I knew this person forever.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And now Kieran and I are going to these like award shows together. And it's like – it's just not the same level of comfort with each other. Partly it's the venue. But also it's because when you're playing a character and like – It's he has license to hug me and push me and make fun of me and slap me.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And I have license to kind of like be scared of him, but also kind of lord my stability over him in the movie. Like there's it's just such a more comfortable relationship because the the set of circumstances and the and the scenes dictate what we have to do. And to me, it's just like there's nothing more comforting in the world.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Yeah. So before I was born, she was like a choreographer in a Christian boys school in Philly. Well, my dad was at Temple getting his degree. When I was growing up, though, she was a birthday party clown. So she did like birthday parties in the tri-state area, you know. And so she would... You know, basically wake up every morning and, you know, tiptoe downstairs and tune her guitar.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And she would be, you know, put on her makeup and her ridiculous outfit and her shoes and, you know, her pinwheel hat. And so she was doing some, like, real absurdist performance. And so that was just normalized to me. So when I was, like, you know, acting or got into the arts...
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
To me, like, the awkward leap that a lot of people have to make to, like, be on stage and do something, I'm using quotes, silly on stage, like, a lot of people find that to be, like, an awkward hump to get over. But for me, it was just totally natural because I grew up seeing that normalized, seeing silly behavior not only normalized but, like, professionalized. And so...
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
It was kind of a seamless transition for me to be in the arts. Like right now, I go on set and I'm just totally unselfconscious. I know I seem like a self-conscious kind of person as we're speaking. But when I'm on a movie set, for some reason, I just give over to the story and I let my emotions and imagination take me. And I'm happy doing anything.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
I've played villains in movies and, you know, I played a bodybuilder who joins a cult last year in a movie. And to me, I just this stuff to me is so much more comforting than just trying to navigate normal stuff.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
You know, as an actor, your job is to kind of like really understand your character, even if the character is like a villain in a movie. You know, your job is to defend your character, right?
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And so I spent a lot of time thinking about this guy and thinking about, you know, how he felt outcast in the world and created this thing in order to connect with other people because he felt uncomfortable connecting with other people through more traditional social norms. And... And at the time when I was acting in it, I thought, oh, this is wonderful and totally defensible.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
This is a guy who is ambitious because he has this great thing that he's going to unleash on the world. And when I see like, you know, the news now, of course, is that, you know, they ended fact checking, you know, whatever. I'm like, oh, I wonder if that's really an extension of that same thing.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
A person whose kind of ambition really, let's say, supersedes their caution in a way that can be pretty dangerous. And now that the platform is so powerful and owns all these other things, you know, I guess I feel a little bit sad. Why is this the path you're taking? Yeah.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And so I mostly just think of it that way of like, oh, this is that same person that I spent a long time, you know, humanizing and thinking about, you know, and trying to justify and defend his behavior.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Yes. I became obsessed with Chopin's music in 2008 when I visited Poland. My wife and I went to Chopin's house, which is outside Warsaw. It's a museum now. And I just became obsessed with the music because right after I did that trip, I wrote my first play, which took place in Poland, and I put Chopin's music as the interstitial music in the play. And so I went down a rabbit hole of
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
much of his work. And so when I was writing this movie, A Real Pain, I was listening to his music and I started putting his music in the scenes, in the script.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
I would say, like, over the scene, this track is playing, which turned out to be just wonderfully beneficial because on set, I would play the music that would be underscoring the scene so that the actors and that the cameramen had a feel for what the tone is going to be. So I would give it to the dolly grip, which is the guy who pushes the camera and who sets the pace for the scene.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And I would say, this is the song that's playing underneath, so can we try to you know, use this as, you know, as a guide for the pacing. So it was really, really wonderful and helpful. And I just, you know, I'm not a classical music buff, but I am a Chopin buff.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Oh, my God, of course. I'm allowed to dictate that kind of thing.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Yeah. Of course. That's amazing. Right. So my favorite piece of his is Opus 25, number one. It's the scene that plays over the ending of the movie. It's also colloquially known as Aurelian Harp.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Thanks. What a privilege to speak to you finally. Thank you.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, one of the kind of ironies with Kieran's character in the movie, you know, as you said, he kind of plays this incredibly charming and manic guy. But he also just is privately suffering from severe depression. I mean, severe, like, you know, you know, wondering if he wants to go on with his life.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And one of the dramatic ironies in the movie is that our grandmother survived, as I say in the movie, by a thousand miracles. You know, you know, the way my family survived. survived the war.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
They were, you know, hidden in basements with their teachers, you know, crazy stories as, as you know, from, you know, anybody who survived the Holocaust, there's usually a story that's, you know, incredibly shocking and more shocking than the last one you heard.
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
So like, there's this irony where we are the products of a thousand miracles and yet Kieran's character doesn't even know if he wants to live. And what is that? Why do we walk around with all this modern pain when our lives are materially comfortable after being the products of incredible stories of survival?
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And it's something I think about all the time because I'm, like, you know, a depressed, you know, person or whatever. And, you know, like, I walk around and I have, like, a materially nice life. And I walk around kind of, like, you know, feeling bad for myself, being miserable over, you know, minor things. And yet I'm also incredibly, like...
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Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
fascinated by my family's history in Poland and learning like about the suffering and I don't know how to reconcile those two things of feeling bad about my very fortunate life and also understanding the horrors of my family's past or the horrors of people around the world today and because I can't reconcile those two things I was trying to sort out that in the movie which is why the title A Real Pain it's like what is asking the audience that question what is real pain is my character's manageable medicated OCD
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Pain valid? Is Kieran's pain valid, even though, you know, he's experiencing, you know, the worst of what a kind of psyche can experience, but at the same time, he is in a comfortable life, no one is trying to kill him? Or is the only pain that's valid and should be kind of acknowledged is the pain of war and of kind of mass genocide and, you know, mass trauma?
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
So like, you know, when I was writing the movie, I had set a scene at Majdanek. That's the camp that was like, you know, it's really five minutes away from where I had family. And, uh, As soon as I finished the script, I just assumed that we'd be able to, you know, film there because it was in the script.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Until we got Polish producers on board who told me that they read the script and they think everything is doable, but that it's going to cost a million dollars to build Majdanek. I was like, what do you mean a million dollars? It's already there. She said, well, no, you can't film, you know, a narrative movie, you know, at a concentration camp.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
These are hallowed grounds and, you know, they get asked every day to be turned into... You know, essentially, you know, war sets, you know, that they take place in 1942 and have extras running around in Nazi uniforms. And, like, they just don't – of course, they're not going to allow that at this kind of site, which is a cemetery, which is a site of, you know, mass horror. And so –
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Over the course of like the next eight months before we made the movie, I just tried to reach out in any way possible to this concentration camp, Majdanek, to explain what I wanted to do, which is I wanted to film a scene of a modern tour group going through this place, you know, in an attempt to have it be part of the movie, but also to show audiences what this place is.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And my kind of plea to them was that I want to do the same thing you're doing. You exist as a museum to show people today what happened on this site. And I'm trying to do the same thing through my movie. And so once we kind of were able to, you know, speak to the people who work there, who are these unbelievably beautiful, brilliant young academics.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
These are not like state apparatchiks who are running this place. These are like young academics who could be doing anything with their lives and are spending it every day at a concentration camp to preserve the memory of Jewish history. And so once we were able to be in touch with them, they understood what my motivation was and how respectful we were going to be, how the scenes would be shot.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
We went over every word in the script. We went over every angle that we wanted to film. And it took a long time, but they agreed to it. And we had two cameras, and we basically set up the shots in the most, like, you know, un-kind of fettered way. We would, you know, it was written in the script, even, that these scenes will be shot very simply. There will be no music.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
The actors will walk in and out of the rooms. That's how I wrote it in the script, and that's what we filmed. We set up the shot. The actors walked in. I asked them to not block each other so we could see everybody's face or whatever. And they experienced what they experienced, looking at the shoes or looking at a gas chamber, et cetera, these places of horror. And then they exited the room.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And so it was done with like the absolute utmost simplicity and care and reverence.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
That's exactly it. So, you know, this place, Majdanek, is in Lublin. So it's in the southeast of the country. Lublin is this really bustling, gorgeous, vibrant college town. And five minutes away from this, again, gorgeous, bustling, you know, cosmopolitan college town is this death camp. And when I say five minutes, that's not hyperbole.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Like, you drive five minutes down the road, and you are in this death camp. And so... It's not a real known one, but what makes Majdanek really interesting, as opposed to Auschwitz, is that it's so far east that the Russians liberated the camp before the Nazis could really destroy it.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
So the other camps, as you go further west in Europe, were destroyed by the Nazis as the Soviets or the Americans liberated the camps. But this one, as we say in the movie, is kind of well-preserved, for lack of a better phrase. It looks like it was liberated that morning.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Yeah. So, like, I imagine you're probably familiar with, like, the reputation that Poland has amongst, like, kind of American Jews, which is that, you know, I grew up hearing, oh, they're anti-Semitic and, you know, they're, you know, all the death camps were there, you know. But my experience there was so different. My experience there was really different.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
kind of revelatory in the following way. We were going to all these sites of Jewish history, of Jewish, you know, horror. And all the people that I met who were working there were like, you know, 90% non-Jews, people who had spent their lives doing far more to memorialize my family's history than I or anybody in my family is doing.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And I just had this great feeling of indebtedness to the Poles who have done a really good job of preserving a lot of this history. I know they're criticized in various ways and the government's criticized in various ways, but like... The Germans built these camps in Poland and the Poles are still left with these things, you know, and they're really well done to preserve Jewish history there.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And I just felt this kind of like just open hearted indebtedness to that.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Yeah, so the movie's based on kind of like two people. So what we speak of in the movie is our Grandma Dory. She's my Aunt Doris. And she left Poland in 1918. The person who survived the war is my cousin Maria. And Maria actually stayed in Poland after the war. Both of them actually passed away in, well, actually in 2019 and 2021, respectively. And... My Aunt Doris, she was like my mentor.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
I don't know exactly how to describe her. She was tough, really strict with me. And I started seeing her when I was like 17 every Thursday. I would see her every Thursday for three hours up until she died. She died at 106 years old in 2019. I even lived with her in my early 30s in her cramped apartment. I was very interested in her life because she had a very interesting life.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And she was not impressed with me being a movie actor, which I started when I was 17 as well. And I think I needed that kind of like real world, you know, humbling mechanism. And being with her every week made me feel like connected to the bigger world more. The person that survived the war, Maria, you know, it's as we kind of described in the movie Through a Thousand Miracles.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And I stayed with her for several weeks in Poland as well. And she was just this lovely but very tragic figure who I think was like... expected disappointment from the world in a way that I found so sad. She expected to be disappointed. She had, on top of surviving the Holocaust and losing all of her family, she also lost a son when he was 18.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And so she just, I think, had this expectation from the world that it was going to be disappointing. And so it was almost like a nihilism rather than a kind of misery. And that was more sad. I think when you're miserable, there's like a little...
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
You know, maybe a little, you know, streak inside you that's still like hopeful and the misery is because you're not experiencing the thing that you were hoping for. But a nihilism is something altogether worse, you know, which is that, you know, you don't expect anything positive to happen. And that's what she displayed most.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
Wow, that's a great question. My family has become increasingly secular just because it was assimilated into American culture. You become probably a little more secular. That's probably not uncommon. But, yeah, I think my family in general does not think in a kind of tribal way. And so I think, like, the takeaway from the Holocaust would probably be something more along the lines of –
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
you know, goodness, look what people can do to each other rather than look what people do to Jews. That's certainly my take on the world and certainly my parents' take on the world. In some ways, I suppose it's made us more kind of like open in a humanistic way to like the pains of others, the pains of others who are, you know, not Jews.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
You know, one of the characters in this movie, A Real Pain, is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. His character is based on my friend. They both have the same name, Eloge.
Fresh Air
Jesse Eisenberg Hated Bar Mitzvahs As A Kid
And Eloge, the real Eloge, is the same as the character in the movie and the stories that they tell are true, which is that my friend Eloge survived the Rwandan genocide, moved to Winnipeg, and the only people he felt kind of like can understand him were Holocaust survivors because they'd been through a genocide. And he converted to Judaism, and he felt such a deep connection to Jewish culture.
Search Engine
The New Zuckerberg
Relationship status. Interested in. This is what drives life in college. Are you having sex or aren't you? It's white people.
Search Engine
The New Zuckerberg
You know, that's what the Facebook is going to be about. People are going to log on because after all the cake and watermelon, there's a chance they're actually going to get laid. Meet a girl. Yes. That is really good.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Oh, God, not at all. No, I feel mortified and pretentious when I open my mouth. No, I- Oh, really? Yes, I'm aware that I probably sound like annoying to many people. No, no, you sound brilliant.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Oh, God, no, I don't. Do you suffer fools? No, I have. I've got a tough time with that. Deep shame and self-hatred. I assume everybody else in the world is like kind of right.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
so indebted to that anybody's coming to the set and waking up at six in the morning and they probably have a dog that's being left home alone no I just don't ever feel that way but I think I'm just encumbered with guilt so like I just wouldn't I thought I wouldn't allow that thought to come into my mind because I would feel well why am I worthy of having that you know okay got it and we will be right back and now back to the show did you grow up in the city are you did you grow up in New York
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
I grew up in Queens and New Jersey, so I'm never Manhattan. Oh, you did?
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Okay. Yeah, so, no, as a, like, again, my background is playwriting, and no one changes the words ever, because when you do a play, I mean, as you all know. You get written up. Well, yeah, that, but also, like, most playwrights are dead, so you're just not, theater actors are not in the habit of changing dialogue, you know.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
And then, so, this is my second movie, and, yeah, I just, yeah, it doesn't, it brings weird to my ear, so I...
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
don't like it but you know occasionally somebody's so brilliant like kieran as you met he's so clever and quick and spontaneous so you know he would sometimes change a word here and there and it was always really good you wouldn't you wouldn't like come in you want to come in after taking go huh okay all right let's just check the script i'm just going to double check yeah so i'm just going to leave it right in front of you just yeah just because we don't have a coaster you must have gotten an old yeah exactly exactly
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
That wasn't my experience, but I don't also think I tried to change anything. It wasn't like I had a clever idea that was funnier than Aaron Sorkin's joke.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
My character, that's really interesting. My character didn't talk in a naturalistic way. He was kind of like this almost robotic presence. And so actually, for me, it felt like this is perfect. In fact, the gamesmanship of adhering to this exact thing was part of the character. Exactly. I just saw it, by the way, like last year for the first time.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
I mean, I never did it and don't do it. But I don't know, I feel weird, like, putting more stuff about myself online. Like, it's already kind of embarrassing. You know, like, it's weird to be a public person in general, so I didn't want to go online. But that mostly has to do with my just complete discomfort with myself. And so, like, I didn't want to, like, talk about, you know, I guess things.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
But, you know, I don't know. I'm suspicious of it for so many other reasons, too. And, you know, the movie depicts, like, this person creating it who does not have, like, what I would consider, like, kind of healthy social relationships. And so, like, if this product is the extension of this person's social behavior, then this is not great.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
And now... But think about it this way, too. Like, we used to interact, like, in kind of ways that are kind of mushy. You know, you would make a weird joke and the person wouldn't react the way, so you wouldn't make that joke again. Or you would find that somebody has the same sense of humor.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
And like what relationships get reduced to like on like line and forgive me because I'm not on these things, but this is my kind of cynical like attitude towards it is like, we like the same band. And so it hooks us up and everything. And that's essentially like the character I was playing could interact with people like that on this very much like- We both like this band.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Let's stand here and talk about it. And, like, that's the way the thing works, too. It recommends this person to you. Or, you know, if you're dating, it recommends this person to you. And it just takes out, like, the squishy humanness that we have in our lives outside of the internet.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
I truly know nothing about this because I'm not on it. I haven't had the experience of being on it.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Yeah. That's my perspective. But my perspective is really as an outsider because I haven't been on it. But yeah, like that, it creates, you know, isolation, sectarianism, all this stuff.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
I'm kidding. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm actually live tweeting this whole thing. Yeah. Going great. Sean said social network is so good. Thumbs up.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Yeah, no, I went to college for 18 years before I got my degree because I would go to a semester and then take off and work and then go back. And so I got my degree during the pandemic finally. Oh, you're serious? Yes.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Yeah, exactly. It took me 18 years. Yeah, exactly. No way. Yeah, like the second 18 years of my life. Yeah, from 18 to 36. And I chose anthropology because that was my wife's degree. She graduated like many, many years before. So that was her degree. And I just wanted to, you know, have something to talk about with her. That's cool. Yeah, because I knew I wanted to be in the arts.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Yeah, anthropology is like the study of, and I'm using quotes, the other. It's the study of other cultures, the study of other people. What you learn from it is that your culture is not superior to another culture, even if that culture is, let's say, more poor or something. You learn to kind of view cultures as their own value to the effect that they have on each other.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
So an anthropologist would go to study, famously, go to Samoan village, Margaret Mead is his famous anthropologist, go to a Samoan village and live with them and study their ways and everything.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Yeah, yeah. My dad's PhD is social psychology. And so he was studying basically like, you know, human behavior, irrespective of culture. You know, it was about people interacting with each other. Anthropology really focuses on like cultures. Right, right, right. Wow.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Come on, Jesse. Jesse. Come on, Jesse. Hi, hi, hi. Hi. Thank you so much for the interview. You're very welcome. Nice to meet you. Sorry I clapped so loud. Thank you so much. Yeah. You have large hands? No, I think I was like, I think I didn't understand where I have to be in relation to this microphone. You know what I mean? It's difficult.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
It's the least fascinating culture. Okay, the most boring culture, you guys, is I'm doing top 10 worst cultures.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Yeah. And this one is boring, but also stupid. So, okay, this one, no, I mean, well, I kind of like, I did my like ethnography, which is like, you know, your big thesis. I did it on this like, this restaurant in Chelsea that was like the last remaining authentic Latin American restaurant because everything else had been destroyed. you know, gentrified away.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
And this place was, but it was so, it was kind of a cheat because it was like down the block. And I got to eat there while I was doing my field research, you know. But it was really interesting to see how this place was trying to survive against, you know, basically.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
I thought it was like cultures across the world. Like you're like. It is. This was cultural. Oh, okay. It was my wife. My wife went to Nicaragua. Restaurant review, dude. Yeah, no. Wait, what restaurant was it? We can always cut it out. It was called La Taza de Oro. It's not there anymore. Yeah, we published the thesis actually to Yelp, so it was interesting to get to publish.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
No, no, no, I'm kidding. You know, not every student gets their work published, but for me, it went, you know, it was in the bottom.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
No, I was in a movie before that when I was, like, 18. Roger Dodger? Yeah, Roger Dodger, right out of high school, yeah. And it was, like, the difference between having an acting career or not. Like, it was literally the difference, because I was supposed to go to college that year, and my dad, like, I pled with him. I was like, please just read the script, it's so good.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
And my dad read it and said, okay, you could take off a semester and do this movie. And the movie was, like, not a hit, but was, like, popular amongst, you know, people who like movies.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
That is the highest of cotton. That is the goal. That is the goal. You know you've made it when you have to transfer.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Yes? Exactly. Exactly. And like right after that movie, I got like offered another movie and it was to pay scale. It was like a movie. I don't think it ever got made. It was probably like a – $50,000 budget. But I remember going to my dad and like, I could get jobs, like I could literally just get jobs.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Because before that, you know, I was auditioning for commercials and anything that I could possibly get an audition for and, you know, understudies and plays and stuff like that. So it felt like, oh, I can literally make a career and a possible living from this.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Yeah, actually, no, right before that, I did this movie, Cursed. It was Dimension, and it was Dimension. So it was run by Bob Weinstein, and this guy would, it was crazy. This guy, basically, it was a Wes Craven-directed movie, and Bob Weinstein would just constantly scrap everything we'd done to the point where we shot, it was supposed to be a 55-day shoot. We shot 125 days. Oh, my God.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
No, no, no. Nor do I do a lot of mic work. I mainly use, you know, just like my headset. But today, you know, your podcast is worthy of this Rode NT-USB Mini. Yeah.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Because this guy, Bob Weinstein, who's not like, you know, a writer, you know, would just decide he wanted to change everything in the script, and it was crazy. It was crazy and fascinating to work with. with that man.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
No, I'm kidding. What he's up to. I wanted to turn down the movie and he called me in for a meeting and he's threatened my career and then he said at the end as I was leaving, he said, I know where you live. I said, what? Jesus Christ. And I was like, are you kidding? And he was like, no, no, no. She told me, his casting director. He goes, no, no, no. She told me where you live. Oh, these guys.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Wow. What a duo. I know. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. When all this stuff came out, I was just like, oh, yeah, I've been telling this story forever. And people sometimes can't believe it. It sounds so shocking. And then, of course, my story was like nothing compared to, you know. Cute.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Well, it's just like he was writing just stuff that amused him. And so that was the trick. It's like, oh, yeah, you can write the things that you like, and it'll translate, you know, hopefully. And the other main thing I learned was from Lauren. I don't know if she ever did this to you, probably. But she had a slap me in the movie. Has she slapped you? Probably. Probably.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Okay, so this is what she told me. Right before she slapped me, she said, do you know what the trick is to slap somebody in a movie? And I was like, no, please tell me. Thank you, tell me. Did she just whack you? Surprise. Yeah, she goes, you look the person in the eye and then you just, you hit them with your hand. And I was like, oh, that's not a trick at all.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
We bought it for you. You don't have to sell it. Even across the pond, I take my road. I'm in England. Oh, that's why.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
And so she just spent the night slapping me. And that was the trick. And then in this movie I made with Kieran, I said, you know, I have to slap him at the end of the movie. And it's this big thing at the end of the movie. And I told him, do you know the trick? I learned this from the great Laura Linney. And I was like, you just, I slap you really hard.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
You just gotta make sure you have eye contact. Yeah, exactly. Make eye contact. Yeah, which doesn't mitigate the feeling at all.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Stay in the character, yeah. Oh, that's funny. I'm not dumb. Was it, it was not, it happened on one take? It's in the show, and that's the one they use.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
I'm in the dressing room of the Graham Norton show. Oh, the Graham Norton show? Are you really? This is not Chatty Man, right? This is... I'm doing a meta press junket. I'm doing it from the press. Yes. Wow. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
I do. I do. And it's weird because I have like muscle memory from it. We just finished doing the third movie like a month ago. And I just do the same one trick I know. And for audiences who are paying attention, they'll realize that the greatest magician in the world knows one trick. Yeah. I just repurposed the one thing I learned. Yeah. In a different outfit.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Read credits on movies. You're going to peek behind every curtain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, when you hear about these, like, when you hear how these magicians have done the trick, though, sometimes it's far more impressive than the trick because the kind of work that went into making something look seamless is, like, you know, shocking. Yeah, for sure.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Yeah. But this is good because I can stay in this kind of like self-indulgent place. I could just talk about myself for the next 48 hours and I'll be okay.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
No, I've always just wanted to write plays. And then my last play, which was like 2019, just like wasn't received well. And I was like kind of really, yeah, like kind of heartbroken or whatever. Like the play wasn't received well. And I mean, the actors were amazing in it, but the play wasn't received well. And like, so I just was like, I have to try something else. I just made me feel bad.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
And there was like scrutiny in a way that felt like mean spirited in a way that was like, oh, this is industry can be, I mean, movies can also be quite cruel. They really are. But there's something about theater because it's such a small community. I don't know. Anyway, so I just thought, let me try to... I'll do a movie next. Yeah. No, but I love writing plays more than anything.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
But I just thought maybe I should do a movie because... Yeah, and the thing you said about Clout, that like... I did, I guess, feel not so much clout, but more like, oh, I feel like I've been around it enough to kind of have an understanding of what to do.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
I know that sounds so lame, like I didn't go to film school, but I just felt like I've been on sets that have been great and I've been on sets that didn't work and I've been on sets that were terrible sets but made great movies and vice versa. Mm-hmm. I felt like, oh, no, I think I know what to do if I can write something that is, like, tailored to my limited skill set.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
You know what I mean? Of course. And I think in Sean's case, it is cloud. You know, I think you feel you've worked up to this. And I think the industry recognizes that you can open that stuff. I didn't want to embarrass anybody. Yeah. It's good that you're finally in a place where you feel like, yes, I can do that, and yes, I'm not going to get— It's really good. Thank you.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Oh, thanks. I mean, I don't know. Yeah, but I guess I'm used to scrutiny. I mean, I'm used to scrutiny and I like, I care about it so much, I guess while it's happening and then literally not the next day. I just, you know, I don't want to be governed. Laura Linney said the greatest thing that I actually didn't hear her say, but my dad heard her on Charlie Rose talk about this 20 years ago.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
But they asked, or he asked her, do you read reviews? And she says, no, because I don't want somebody else to tell me how to do my job. And my dad was telling me this because I'm such like, I was like a, you know, self-conscious person. And he said, you know, you're, who we were in that movie with, you know, this is how she views it. And it did really change my perspective.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
I mostly have it like with theater. I mostly have it with theater where like I am enthralled by a piece and then I look online and I'm like, how is this torn apart? This is the greatest thing I've ever seen. Because there's something about like... And I don't know, maybe that even has to do with like different performances offer different things. I don't know. Yeah, yeah.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
But, you know, I do think that all the time. But I'll go the other way, too.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Oh, go, go, Will. So, okay, wait, this is like a prank pulled on me or him or what?
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Only my friend, Ruben Fleischer, who I think you guys know, he did the Zombieland movies, and then we just did Now You See Me Together. I've worked with him a lot. And I just remember on the first Zombieland, we were shooting in what was supposed to be a mansion, and so he was several rooms away on the monitor, and I just heard this muffled scream, now smile! And I was like, what? I...
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
could, like, understand that he was kind of talking to me. Right. But also, I'm not, like, a smiler, you know, but also, like, it can't come... You can't... That's not the way you act. Like, oh, my face will smile, you know. Right, right. So, you know, so that was just something I was like, oh, yeah, I'll never do that. But I love Ruben, and now he's great.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
But you guys have worked with Greg Mottola, I think, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's just, like, my favorite. Like, I just... The way he handled this crew and the cast, and I had, like... which happened to me maybe two or three times in my life. I had like kind of a panic attack during a scene and I just shut down and I just couldn't act. I don't know what happened. I just couldn't act.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
And so it was on this movie Adventureland. I took him aside and I said, I'm so sorry. I don't know what happened. I think I had a panic attack. And I thought he was going to say, well, you know, we can't. I thought he was going to, you know, respond annoyed. And he said, I don't understand how you're not having a panic attack every scene. Like you're exposing yourself.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
You're bringing your emotions. You're trying to not think about your own vanity. He is such a sweet man. And I just remember thinking, that's the way I want to think about actors forever, which is that they're already doing this difficult thing. They're trying to avoid thinking about their face being blown up on screen. They're avoiding thinking about the scrutiny that they're going to get.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
They're trying to live in the moment despite a hundred strangers standing around them. And so that was a key for me. He's just the best, isn't he?
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Because to me, to have like a prescribed way of behaving because of a character and lines, I feel so comfortable. Like the thing that makes me nervous is like you go into a party and what am I say to this person? Do I remember this person? What did this person tell me? Why do I have to be funny in this thing? I just want to go home.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Like to have like a prescribed way, like you're playing this character, they wear these pants that we put you in and you have to now go talk to that other person in this voice. Like this is the greatest thing in the world. So calming.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
It's the only thing that still freaks me out in our industry. Like literally nothing else but going on these talk shows at night freaked me out because I don't, I can't be funny telling a story for like the second time, you know? I don't know.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Because I try to not tell the story on the show that I told to the person before the day. Because I know if I did that, it would just be weird and phony. You'd be trying to remember what made them laugh on the phone. Kind of like a performance.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
I don't. I don't. I feel like an adrenaline rush when I'm meeting people like you who are really funny. And him, I'm sure he's very funny. You know, you get the adrenaline rush of doing a thing that's fun. Mm-hmm.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Yeah, I guess, yeah, because I've done junkets that we all have for things that have not gone well, and yeah, that can be really uncomfortable, and you're kind of just parsing the... Right, yes.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Oh, thanks. I love your show. Thank you so much for having me on it. Thank you, buddy.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
No, this one's a weird one. The one with this is weird. They're basically like, we're on with like, I'm with Kieran, who's in my movie. And then like, I'm with Daniel Craig. You're on with other people. Right, you stay on the couch. And so the pre-interview, exactly. And so the pre-interview with this one was like, Daniel was shooting in Italy.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
What was it like shooting in New Orleans 15 years ago on a movie? Basically, the link is that we both didn't shoot a movie in New York City. And so, like, I realized the stories they're going for are just these incredibly tenuous links with the guests who have nothing in common.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Wait, I can't tell if you're kidding, because actually that does describe a version of him that I know very well. He's like the greatest. We love him.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Yeah, work on it. No bad ideas. Right, something like that. Listen, I'll figure that out in a moment. Don't you worry. Yeah.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
I think it was. No, it wasn't. Oh, no, there was. Yeah, there was. Never mind. You know, Kieran is like the, oh, he's like the biggest fan of your show. And just a very uncomfortable thing happened once is where he told me, we were on a plane, and he said, like, he loves your show so much, he said, except one episode. And he told me the name of the guest, and it actually does escape my memory now.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
I forgot who he said was like not a good guest. And then I ran into that person, and I was so nervous that I had this information in my head that they were the worst guests on Smartless. And so I said to them, Kieran said you were the best guest on Smartless. Tell me what you did. Oh, really? Yeah. And you don't remember who it is? I don't remember who it is.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Jesse, we met briefly. We met each other, Will, yeah. Wait, what? What? It was in LA at a studio, but we were doing a promotional video with Jimmy Kimmel for Batman.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Yes. Do you remember that? Yes. It was so weird. With Ben Affleck. That's right. It was like a reverse engineered idea. Cavill.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Yeah, that's right. It was like they were meeting at a party and I was playing the bad guy. And yeah, you came in afterwards. And I think Jimmy Kimmel came in afterwards as Batman or something. I can't remember it.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Really? And I told him that. Yeah, I would hope so, yeah. That's not exactly the thing I walked away with. I can't remember, was he really good? Wait, like how so? Like he seemed genuine?
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
No, I've been like, I've been writing like plays like in New York for like 20 years. But this is like, and I've had like some, you know, some popular plays or whatever, but like nothing to like this level. Well, I had two plays that were going to go to Broadway were both canceled. the week before we put out the press announcement for different weird reasons.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
So, like, this is the first thing that I'm really getting, like, more attention, and it's quite surreal, because I feel like, well, I've been doing the same thing for 20 years, but people like this one, and it makes me wonder where I went wrong 20 years ago.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
A real play, the film. I thought you were saying you were doing... No, no, no, no, no. I gave up on the medium entirely because it gave up on me. And so, no, no, just now like I wrote a thing that's like now people like it and they're saying, well, you know, it has this unusual tone. I want to say I've been doing that for so long, but no one liked it. But anyway, so yeah.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
And before that, I was just writing like joke writing. I wanted to write, you know, sketch comedy when I was younger. No way. Really? Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, when I was 17, I put together like a packet for Saturday Night Live. Actually, when I was 16, I wrote a script about Woody Allen and it got sent to him.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
It was about like a fictional version of him now at 16, which is what I was, changing his name to Woody Allen. And it got like sent through various channels to his lawyers who then sent me a cease and desist letter. Oh my God. But then you ended up doing three films with him. Did it come up? I did movies. It came up once. We were on like a press junket.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
He's so uninterested in anybody else, you know? So like, I don't mean that as a criticism. He's just like, he's just like, basically I knew what would happen is that somebody during press would bring it up because it's like a cute story that's on the internet. And he would go, oh, that's interesting. I never didn't know that and would never think about it again.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
And I knew I can go up to him and say, hey, that was weird, right? He would just have no... He just doesn't have any interest in stuff like that. I think he's just been like so famous and celebrated for so many years that he's uninterested in like the public persona. And so he didn't care about that and we didn't share a nice laugh or a drink.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Well, the lawyer is his producer. I got to know the lawyer. But I'm sure there were 10,000 letters like they were sending that every day to everybody who wanted to make a movie about him. I remember I got home from school one day and my dad said, we have good news and bad news. I said, what's the good news? He's like, we heard from Woody Allen. I was like, what's the bad news?
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
He's like, you might have to get a lawyer. And he sent me the thing and I framed it right away. It was so exciting. Wow.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
I mean, no, I mean, I think it depends on like the project and like, you know, you know, you could make the same argument that you have to keep people's attention for two hours on one set. And, you know, there's something incredibly difficult about that. Whereas a movie, you can have music come in and you could have close-ups and you could re-edit it to...
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
within an inch of its life and it could turn into something that's test screened a bunch of times. So like, no, I mean, my plays have been basically like four scenes total. So like a half hour scenes and, you know, so like half hour scenes for a two hour play. And I like that. My mind works in that way to like keep scenes going.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
So my struggle with like movie writing is to just make sure the scenes are not seven minutes long.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
No, I'm kidding. But I thought there was... I was clowning him, but I thought there was a gentle... I was doing it gently. Speaking of clowning him with a baby wipe.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
He read the snippet from the Google search engine, you know, where a million things come up, and he read the snippet.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Maybe a little less, only because it's such a managerial thing, as you know. Well, I don't know actually what your experiences have been. But for me, it just felt like I was just aware constantly on set of somebody's plane maybe being delayed. And when I'm writing, I'm sitting in a library by myself and acting. It's like kind of an emotional private experience that you can have.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
And then I just remember, like, I spent the day thinking about... this person's hair person flying in from England, and if there was rain in England, they were going to be late, and then I don't think the actor would come to set. And I was like, this was the least creative thought I've had in my life, let alone on the set of a movie.
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Yeah, I get that. So you don't take on for no apparent reason at all the anxiety of their jobs?
SmartLess
"Jesse Eisenberg"
Listen, I was sitting there in silence just evaluating all of your temples, and I think you all look great in your different ways.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Great. Okay, great. But I didn't prepare anything. Is that okay? That's not a problem.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Yeah, I'm worse. Yeah, my advice would be, God, what would my advice be? No, I mean you can't take advice from somebody who's far worse at it than you are. Maybe some kind of – I was going to say maybe some kind of self-hatred so that you could – it will stifle you more.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
But actually self-hatred for me makes me ramble on further because I'm trying to apologize for the initial thing that I said and then apologize for the apology afterwards. So actually maybe self-love, Sharon. Maybe find some self-love and then you won't feel the need to kind of ramble like I am now.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Yes. Yes. But that's each night. And yes, it's when I've said something that I worry offended somebody. What I find myself doing is walking around the streets in New York or biking around the streets screaming what I said. Like I once said something that was mean. I was 10 years old and I said a mean thing to somebody else. And it just so destroyed me that still I find myself on my bike screaming.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Still yelling the thing. I can't even say it here. It's too traumatic. Because, yeah, I felt so embarrassed because it wasn't me. I don't know who it was. I mean, it was me, but it didn't feel like me. Anyway, my wife and I always joke that, you know, each one of us will walk around saying the thing that we feel guilty for saying about 10 years ago, just blurting it out on the street.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Right. So this concept of trying to help this person immediately took a nosedive into making things worse. Okay, good. But at least we also brought up trauma for you, so we at least accomplished that.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Got it. A noble pursuit and a great aspiration from Tyler. You know, I don't know. I have these kind of very ambivalent feelings about receiving Christmas cards from families where they all talk about the things they did this year.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
I'm like – I have such deep shame about my life and so does my wife who's like – my wife is like an amazing, amazing woman who should feel nothing but – Great feeling about it. And yet both of us just kind of marvel at the confidence that families have by putting these things out. And I'm such a cynical person.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
So I assume when I'm getting these cards with their family achievements, I'm assuming this is a family that's about to get a divorce because this must be a band-aid for the thing that's happening darkly, darkly underneath the skeleton. Right. I have a little bit of a cynical attitude.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
However, when I read them and I kind of get rid of like my cynical knee-jerk reaction, I find that to be actually quite sweet and lovely that the family is creating this kind of sweet tradition. So this is all to say to Tyler that actually maybe people are appreciating it more than you suspect. You've come to the conclusion that they don't. But I guess I would investigate that more.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Exactly. Unexpectedly, and at the same time, I haven't slept in 24 hours, so perhaps that's where I am right now.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Sure. I mean as a person who kind of struggles every day to just get out of bed – no, I'm kidding. Wait, how do I get the mildew smell out of jeans? I don't know. Don't people freeze their jeans? I don't know what that does. But maybe give it a whirl and then baking soda.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
I do clean my refrigerator and freezer. Yeah, I just like cleaning my house so much. I don't know. It gives me actually a sense of— control and comfort. And I just love it so much. And after my kid goes to sleep, I clean the house and my wife is happy with me. And so it has all these wonderful ripple effects.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
And to that point, I clean the refrigerator and it's just a very comforting part of my day. Yeah. Okay. So it's a way to, it's kind of a meditative practice of yours. Yes. And I like a clean fridge. You know, I used to do a really dumb thing, which is that I would take out everything in the fridge, including the shelves, and go inside of fridges. And I really liked it.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
I liked that small space and I liked that it was kind of like fun to do and the slight danger of it with the fridge, you know, lock. And so I'm really familiar with the fridge and how to take out shelves and, you know, because I did it recreationally for a while. When you say as an adult, you would enter the fridge? Yes, only in my 20s and 30s. That's right. The flexibility required.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
I had big fridges. It's incredibly fun. And for people listening, it's incredibly fun. Do it with another person. Okay. Put all the stuff on the counter and get in that fridge.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
I've never been trapped. I've never been trapped. But I will say the immediate feeling is claustrophobia and terror. It would seem that that makes sense. That fits. But it answers a question we've long held, which is, does the light turn off when you close the fridge? And I know the answer to that. I don't want to reveal it today, but I just want to say you can find out if you go in your fridge.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
Okay, I have a great solution for this. My wife thinks it's odd but lovable, but I am just constantly picking food out of her teeth. I just reach my dirty paws into her mouth and take that spinach. And I find there's something very sweet and affectionate of just, especially if it's in the guy's beard, just take it. Just take it. Don't be appreciative. It's a sweet moment between two people.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
We never touch enough. And you know what? We could use some self-love. There we go.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
HTDE: Don't Get in the Fridge, with Jesse Eisenberg
We've done it. Yeah. I'd like to create a theme at the beginning of this game I never played before. Carry it through. Well, Jesse, thank you so much for all your help today. This is an absolute honor. And I'm so happy that you guys are doing this show.