Actor or director: What does Jesse Eisenberg’s future hold?
When Jesse Eisenberg was nominated for the ‘Best Original Screenplay’ Academy Award for his excellent A Real Pain script, it was a true validation for a movie that began life as a short story he’d written. Over the years, he developed it into a feature film script that he ultimately directed and starred in, and the simultaneously funny and nuanced film captured the heart of anyone who saw it. It was only Eisenberg’s second directorial effort after 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World, although it made a much bigger splash than that black comedy did.
Eisenberg has been honest about how hard it was to get A Real Pain greenlit, even though it was a fairly small $3million movie. When You Finish Saving the World clearly hadn’t convinced Hollywood that the charmingly nervous actor best known for playing Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network was a director it wanted to bet on. He persevered, though, and managed to make something that connected with audiences on a truly profound level.
Naturally, success begets more success, and Eisenberg has revealed that the acclaim afforded to A Real Pain made it much easier for him to secure funding for his next film. In November 2024, it was announced that his third film would be a musical set in “the high-stakes world of this community theatre” – which sounds hilarious in and of itself. The fact that it will star Paul Giamatti and Julianne Moore is the icing on the cake, though.
However, enjoying success is not something that Eisenberg finds easy. He amusingly admitted to CBS News that when he found out he’d been nominated for the Oscar, it triggered “some guilt response in my brain”, and he immediately began trying “to find something to be miserable about”. He smiled, “I’m not really wired to enjoy praise”, but given how A Real Pain has gone over, it’s something he’s going to have to get used to.
Will Jesse Esineberg become a full-time director?
During his press tour, Eisenberg was asked about how he wants his future to pan out and whether he plans to continue acting. He told The Hollywood Reporter that he’d ideally direct one movie every year and had no plans to give up on acting. After all, he’s got Now You See Me 3 coming up, but it’s notable that this is the only acting credit listed as “upcoming” on his IMDb page.
It begs the question: does Eisenberg’s future lie more in directing than acting? It can’t be denied that, even though he’s made some great indie movies in the last seven or eight years, he hasn’t truly been a mainstream Hollywood draw for a while. I loved the black comedy The Art of Self-Defense and the absurd horror Vivarium, for example, but neither of these films made much of an impression commercially.
Maybe he’s correct in his theory that playing Lex Luthor in the ill-fated Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice really did damage his acting career. “I’ve never said this before, and it’s kind of embarrassing to admit,” he recently said, “but I genuinely think it actually hurt my career in a real way because I was poorly received in something so public.” That was very different from being in a bad movie that nobody saw, and Eisenberg thinks he suffered for it.
Even if he doesn’t want it to happen, it’s tempting to wonder what Eisenberg will do if ‘Jesse the director’ continues to gather steam over ‘Jesse the actor’. If things do pan out like that, though, would it be the worst thing? After all, A Real Pain has been rapturously received, and his wonderful blend of heartfelt, socially and emotionally conscious comedy will always have a place in Hollywood.
Maybe Eisenberg should simply embrace this turn in his career and not find a way to, as he put it, make himself miserable.
