Jesse Eisenberg: Now you’ll see him even more

By Roger Moore

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

ORLANDO, Fla.

Jesse Eisenberg earned an Oscar nomination playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. In “Zombieland,” he’s the narrator who has figured out all manner of “rules” for surviving the zombie apocalypse.

So when his clever magician, Michael Atlas, cracks to a cop about who “the smartest guy in the room” is in the heist picture “Now You See Me,” the casting seems on the nose.

“Everybody thinks they’re pretty smart,” Eisenberg shrugs. “Even people who aren’t, in fact, smart at all.”

But even his colleagues are perfectly willing to vouch for his wits. “He’s endlessly clever,” enthuses Isla Fisher, who co-stars with him in “Now You See Me” (opening Friday).

So when Eisenberg, who has taken to writing and starring in his own plays in New York when he isn’t making movies, faced a problem brought on by that, it’s no surprise that his solution was very “smartest actor in the room.”

“I was experiencing a LOT of stage fright, and nervousness about going on every night doing this play,” he explains. “And ‘Now You See Me’ was a movie script about the most confident performer in the world. I thought, ‘THAT would be interesting. Feeling confident about performing, instead of being nervous.

“I liked the storyline, but the fact that I got to play somebody unlike myself — a confident performer — was the big selling point. I went straight from a play, with a nightly anxiety attack, to playing the most confident guy in the world. If you can’t be confident, you can play a guy who is confident.”

Eisenberg worked with magicians and came to appreciate their art and how it relates to his own.

“Every illusion, not just the big ones, every flick of the wrist has got to be perfected for you to pull it off. Stuff that seems microscopic to us is actually what separates the great from the amateur.

“In order to manipulate large groups of people, a magician has to be about 10 steps ahead of them. ... It’s fascinating to get into the mind of somebody who can think that way, get inside people’s heads.

“In theater, you have to manage something like the same thing. You can’t stop the show if something goes wrong. The difference is, my character in ‘Now You See Me’ loves that. Me, when I’m doing a play? Nerve-wracking.”