TORONTO – To create a zany world of community theater for his new dark comedy “The Debut,” Jesse Eisenberg just had to look back on his own childhood.
It’s so autobiographical, “this movie takes place 20
minutes from my house in 1990,” the director joked alongside stars Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti during a Sept. 13 Q&A after the premiere of "The Debut" (in theaters Dec. 11) at Toronto International Film Festival .
Ignored by her husband and kids, Mona (Moore) decides to try out for the musical “Nosy Neighbors" at a local New Jersey theater company. She auditions for the part of eccentric building supervisor Miss Danielle, bombs in her first impression for dogmatic director Jerry, and loses the role to a name star (Bernadette Peters). However, when that actress drops out, Mona steps in and immediately butts heads with Jerry, who begins to get Mona on the right path with her character.
Unfortunately, Mona goes too far the other way and becomes obsessed with making her character realistic, changing the lines, going full Method and driving her castmates and director crazy.
Eisenberg started doing community theater when he was around 6. “I was very shy and nervous. And I felt invisible and I hated everything and had troubles in school,” he recalled. When he immediately was welcomed by fellow actors, "it just suddenly felt like I was on this alien planet of nice things.
“And then what happened was I just took it too seriously and took it too far and I kind of ruined my own life in the attempt to understand my thankless tertiary character.”
The overly earnest “Nosy Neighbors” is in the style of the musicals Eisenberg grew up with: “I love the show they're doing more than I love most movies that are like considered great movies,” he said. But his true "muse" for “The Debut” was Moore, writing the part of Mona specifically for the actress, who previously starred in Eisenberg’s debut directorial effort “When You Finish Saving the World.”
Moore reported that getting sort of obsessed with figuring out your character is pretty normal. “There’s a place that you go when you're working on something, you're really trying to figure out what it is and, yeah, it takes over your whole kind of lived experience."
Adds Giamatti: “You're in a bit of a weird dream state all the time.”
But they’ve also seen colleagues who do what Mona does, usually when making a movie, and go down way too far down a rabbit hole. “Every actor has a different kind of process, and you do have to respect it, as long as they're not stepping on anybody else's toes,” Moore said. “So there have been times when people do what they need to do, and I'm like, ‘OK …’ That's sort of part of this creative thing that we do.”
Both Moore and Giamatti are aces at playing their own signature archetypes in “The Debut,” so not much extra research was needed.
“I try not to be the same depressive, broken, middle-aged man all the time. But I'm a depressive, broken, middle-aged man. So what do you want out of me?” Giamatti quipped.
“And I have these housewives,” Moore added. “We have these characters that we just drag along behind us and keep trying to shake them, but they cling to us. They just keep coming back.
“The thing about Mona for me is that she's just a regular person. She finds meaning in community for the first time in her life and that to me was so, so moving. But she should be someone that you see every day. She's us. We're the people that kind of wandered in and found a path into our lives by trying out for the play.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Julianne Moore goes full Method in Jesse Eisenberg's 'The Debut'
