Café Society’s Jesse Eisenberg Turns His Writer’s Eye to the Stage and Small Screen

It is early afternoon on a temperate London day when Jesse Eisenberg leaves the studio where he and his four castmates are putting the last touches on The Spoils, the play he wrote and brought from New York for a West End run. As we weave across the street for lunch at Franco Manca, an artisanal pizzeria, he keeps his shoulders pulled up toward his ears, like the wing joints of a resting bat, posing a barrage of questions as if trying to show that it is possible to be at once winsome, engaged, and ill at ease. (Last year, he gave a pitch-perfect rendition of a magazine writer at work in The End of the Tour, and it is hard to shake the feeling that he’s coming at the interview from the wrong side of the notepad.) When Eisenberg starred in his first Woody Allen movie, To Rome with Love, in 2012, the casting was acclaimed as brilliant and inevitable. Now he takes the lead in Allen’s latest, Café Society, which opened the Cannes Film Festival in May and arrives in theaters this month. Worldly and wistful, his portrayal offers a new take on the high-strung Allenesque hero we have come to know across the years.

“I had an anti-reference, which was to do an impression of Woody Allen,” Eisenberg says when his pizza (capers, olives, and anchovies) arrives. He is wearing a faded, stretched-out gray T-shirt that says motor city and has small wire-framed glasses on his nose. His hair is now buzzed short, leaving no trace of the curls he often wears on-screen. “I think he is the funniest performer,” Eisenberg says. “He’s the subtlest, the cleverest. I knew that if I were to do something like that, it would necessarily fail.” What he saw as a liability, though, Allen saw as a chance to deepen the archetype. “My approach is the approach of a comedian,” Allen says. “I could never act as well as he acts. . . . I would be more comic but less dimensional.”

Café Society, set in the 1930s, is a bildungs­roman of silver-screen glamour. At the outset of the movie, Eisenberg’s character, Bobby Dorfman, fresh from the Bronx in a poorly fitting suit, talks his way into an entry-level Hollywood job with his uncle Phil, a prosperous macher of an agent (played by Steve Carell). Bobby quickly falls in love with his uncle’s free-spirited secretary, Vonnie (Kristen Stewart, completely vibrant), only to discover that her heart already belongs to someone else. Fast-forward a couple of years and Bobby is back in New York, to the delight of his mother (a scene-stealing Jeannie Berlin), working at a nightclub founded by his gangster brother (Corey Stoll). There he rises to the apex of a glittering milieu, with a beautiful wife (Blake Lively), a child, and a palatial house in the suburbs, when Vonnie suddenly reenters his life.

The chemistry between Eisenberg and Stewart defines the film, and it’s been strengthened by repeated collaboration: The two of them worked together in both Adventurelandand American Ultra, and they have what Stewart calls a “second language” on set. “We can communicate a lot without saying much, which is remarkable because we both often say a lot,” she explains. “I can’t do anything around him that would embarrass me.” Stylishly shot with thirties cars and costumes, the film is one of the more sparkling threads in the brocade of Allen’s late career—working into a weave of small, nostalgic efforts, such as Midnight in Paris and Magic in the Moonlight. Like other Allen movies, it draws out an ambivalent allegory of success that, perhaps, echoes the director’s own long, fraught journey out of obscurity.

“I think that perception of life is built into me,” Allen says. “Whether I was doing a love story or cross-country bicycle racing or skydiving, it would come out somehow.” He goes on, “No matter what I would do, my own personal feeling about things creeps into the material.” And so, amid the dreamy fantasy of interwar jazz, there is the fascination with youth’s stumbling charm, the suggestion that the heart is both a cruel tormentor and our irrepressible lodestar. Also, the comic riffing on the straight shot from the shtetl to the high-strung Bronx dinner table—a quintessential Jewish-immigrant experience that spoke directly to the 32-year-old Eisenberg. He’s forever trying to understand his own surroundings through the lens of colorful family lore, occasionally even to the point of futility.

“My relatives in Poland had a dry-goods store,” Eisenberg says. “My aunt, who I see every week, 104 years old, she very specifically remembers the dry-goods store, everything about it, and in fact I went to Poland and visited exactly where the store was—it’s no longer a dry-goods store—and I took pictures for her, and it was a real pain in the ass to get to, and then I brought it back to her thinking that it would change her life, and she could finally feel like she could have closure in her life and die, and she looked at the pictures and said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, that was it,’ and didn’t care. It took me two weeks to drive to this little town and find it. I got into a car accident, and, yeah, the police took my passport——”

“I’m sure she cared in, uh, the broader sense,” I offer.

“No. No. Not even in the broader sense. The micro and macro level. Totally dismissive. And even retroactively will dismiss it. She’s—yeah. Yeah.” And then, as if delighted by the cruel irony of it all, he gives a little smile.

Which came first—Jesse Eisenberg or the Woody Allen character he plays? The question is more complicated than it sounds, because Allen’s films informed Eisenberg’s outlook from an early age. “I think that I am not alone in finding not only the breadth of his work but the content to be inspiring in a way that is unparalleled—and not just unparalleled in my life but unparalleled objectively. I mean, who does the stuff he does?” he asks, nervously shredding his pizza into jagged strips as he talks. In high school, Eisenberg received cease-and-desist letters from the filmmaker’s lawyers after writing a script with “Woody Allen” as the protagonist. When Allen much later saw him in The Social Network and invited him to join To Rome with Love, it was a dream realized. (Allen: “He was exactly what I thought he would be—lively, charming, attractive, projecting intelligence.”) Controversy rose around the Cannes premiere of Café Society, to renewed allegations of Allen’s having sexually abused his daughter Dylan, but Eisenberg says he doesn’t believe in trial by press: “I would be thrilled to do another project with him.”

In certain ways, the two actors’ careers dovetail. Both live in Manhattan, contribute humor pieces to The New Yorker, and have creative ambitions that appear to grow with every project. “When I was younger, I just wanted to do comedy—I was really only interested in acting in things I thought were really funny,” Eisenberg explains. But since his breakout in The Squid and the Whale, he has been branching out, just as Allen progressed from slapstick comedy to drama. The two of them share verbal tics—a distinct pronunciation of “be-cuss,” a devotion to the wordphenomenal—such that they seem products if not of the same mold, at least of the same cosmic workshop.

In other ways, though, they are quite different. Eisenberg studied anthropology in college, at the New School, and his dramatic writing tends to be informed by political drama and social justice. He recently spent four months volunteering at a domestic-violence shelter in Indiana. When The Spoils, the story of a privileged aspiring filmmaker and his Nepalese roommate, opened Off-Broadway last year, The New York Times admired the way Eisenberg’s “clever, frantic dialogue assumes an irresistible authenticity when it’s spoken by the right actors.” The authenticity was no surprise; like much of Eisenberg’s work, the play drew on the broader passions of his life. While he was writing it, he was interested in the politics of Nepal, hence their prominence in the play. His best friend teaches incarcerated children, which informed one of the characters. Also unlike his favorite director, he says, he’s never felt pressure to surmount his ethnicity. “Sid Caesar, Woody Allen, pretty much every Jewish comedian from that era has changed their name,” he says; he can have a successful career with “Eisenberg” in lights.

Living downtown with his sister and her boyfriend (asked whether he is seeing anyone, he demurs), Eisenberg is an avid theatergoer. He’s especially interested right now in the New York playwright Lucy Thurber, in whose plays he’s acted. “It’s so visceral and transgressive and confrontational,” he says of her work. “When I’m writing, that voice is very much in my head.”

Eisenberg has spoken eloquently and often about his struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety, both of which have shaped the way he lives and works as an adult. Writing, he says, is a way of resisting the unstable, checkerboarded quality of many actors’ lives. “I don’t have a steady job, and so I feel the need to constantly produce,” he says. “I’d rather make a lot less money and work on something of my own, to stay busy, to stay employed, to stay active.”

Lately he’s been composing scripts for his first directorial effort, a small-screen series produced by Jax Media and based on the title story of his first collection, Bream Gives Me Hiccups. (In publishing it, Eisenberg joined a growing gaggle of actors who have turned their ambitions to literary fiction: Ethan Hawke, David Duchovny, and, of course, James Franco.) The story is told in the voice of a young boy who writes restaurant reviews; Eisenberg recently shot the pilot with Elliott Smith as the boy and Parker Posey, whom Eisenberg met on the set of Café Society, playing the mother. “She’s been my family’s favorite actress since we were young. The movies that my family watches when we get together are usually Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, you know,” he says. “And the little boy is”—a pause—“phenomenal.”

He stops suddenly, and with an air of apology. “If I could go back I would have done it—like anybody else—a little differently,” he murmurs. Then he catches himself. “But I really liked doing it. I originally—yeah. I liked it. I liked it.”

Grooming: Lauren Parsons
Sittings Editor: Phyllis Posnick
Produced by Art House