Actor Jesse Eisenberg appeared at the 28th Sarajevo Film Festival to screen the new movie, “When You Finish Saving the World,” in which he makes his directorial debut. Speaking during a Q&A panel afterwards, Eisenberg said he took the negative reactions to his version of Lex Luthor in “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” very personally.
“I felt very personal about it,” he said. “The writer, Chris Terrio, is a very serious writer, and he’s a very emotional person. He thought a lot about my character, and I thought a lot about my character too. I talked with my acting coach about the character a lot, about his backstory with his father and his emotional life—and then people hate me.”
In an exclusive interview with Deadline, Eisenberg clarified that he would not rule out a return to the DC but feels it would be unlikely.
“I’d be shocked if I wound up in a DC movie, but it would be a pleasant shock,” he said. “Listen, I’m not a comic book fan. To me, it was not playing a role that I’d envisioned since childhood. To me, it was a chance to play this great character that this great writer wrote, and I loved doing that. So, to play it is a joy, and to not play it isn’t something that I’m going to be ashamed to tell my kids about, because that is not an important genre in my life, even though I loved doing that movie.” So he would still do a superhero movie? “Yeah. Because as an actor, you do all kinds of different things, and sometimes great roles show up in really commercial things and sometimes terrible roles show up in independent films.”
Read more of what he had to say at Deadline.com.
I felt that the dialogue was mostly good, except for granny’s peach tea. They tried to create a southern phrase and it did not work. Chris Terrio is from New York so may not have had enough experience with southerners to write one realistically. I found Eisenberg’s performance too strange and cartoonish. I feel if he had played it like he played Mark Zuckerberg, the movie would have been much better