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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.