Jesse Eisenberg — Deauville Talent Award

Jesse Eisen­berg

Actor of Intranquillity 

With more roles under his belt than years alive, Jesse Eisen­berg (lit­er­al­ly “moun­tain of steel”) today finds him­self at the sum­mit of an excep­tion­al career amid the land­scape of Amer­i­can cin­e­ma. In 38 years, this hyper­ac­tive actor, who is also a direc­tor, author and jour­nal­ist, has relent­less­ly trans­formed him­self, delv­ing into the buried, com­plex truth at the heart of his char­ac­ters, con­fronting their inner malev­o­lence and masculinity. 

With his con­tin­u­ous rapid-fire dic­tion, his con­stant under-the-sur­face irony, his high-strung vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, his mix­ture of hes­i­ta­tion and impul­sive­ness, mute­ness and ver­bosi­ty, he walks the tightrope of his roles with a chameleon-like tal­ent. Stiff and machine-like as Mark Zucker­berg under David Fincher’s direc­tion in The Social Net­work, in which he deliv­ered an excep­tion­al per­for­mance (the film earned eight Oscar nom­i­na­tions, includ­ing Best Actor for Jesse Eisen­berg), a wimpy joint-smok­ing teenaged super­hero in Nima Nourizadeh’s action-com­e­dy Amer­i­can Ultra, he also exhib­it­ed pure phys­i­cal­i­ty and silence when he slipped into the skin of Mar­cel Marceau (Jonathan Jakubowicz’s Resis­tance, pre­sent­ed in Deauville in 2020), this after mak­ing a trade­mark out of his tor­ren­tial flow of words. 

Jesse Eisen­berg has a tal­ent of body and soul, as well as for hard work: he spent nine months immersed in the ultra-Ortho­dox com­mu­ni­ty to pre­pare for his role in Kevin Asch’s Holy Rollers, pre­sent­ed in com­pe­ti­tion in Deauville in 2010, learned mime to become Marceau, and God only knows how he was able to become a dis­con­cert­ing dou­ble for Woody Allen, out of doubt­less admi­ra­tion for a mas­ter whose free­dom and humor he has bor­rowed. He has per­sis­tent­ly bro­ken out of the box­es in which he’s been pigeon­holed: that of the New York Jew or neu­rot­ic teen we met via Noah Baum­bach (The Squid and the Whale) or Greg Mot­to­la (Adven­ture­land). He went on to become a bril­liant magi­cian for Louis Let­terier (Now You See Me) along­side such giants as Mor­gan Free­man, Woody Har­rel­son and Mark Ruf­fa­lo, a pop-cul­ture icon in Zack Snyder’s block­buster Bat­man v Super­man: Dawn of Jus­tice, and an ordi­nary man caught in the night­mare of a mys­te­ri­ous real­i­ty in Lor­can Finnegan’s Vivar­i­um.

This year, he directs his first fea­ture film, When You Fin­ish Sav­ing the World, in which he chal­lenges both mod­ern youth lost in celebri­ty influ­encer cul­ture and an ear­li­er generation’s polit­i­cal activism turned blind. The fea­ture, shot on film, will be pre­sent­ed at the Deauville Film Fes­ti­val as a sneak pre­view with the direc­tor in attendance. 

Jesse Eisen­berg will receive a Deauville Tal­ent Award, hail­ing the tal­ent of an actor who embod­ies the many facets of an Amer­i­ca both dis­turbed and chal­lenged by his intranquillity.