Although it's been either seven, or three, years since he last appeared in the role—depending on how you want to count Zack Snyder's Justice League—Jesse Eisenberg is apparently still smarting over the reaction to his performance as comic book supervillain Lex Luthor. In what we can only accept as a bit of mass-market serendipity, Eisenberg opened up about his disappointments with his Batman V. Superman role (which he reprised, briefly, for an after-credits sequence in Justice League) during the same week that the world got its first really good look at the next Luthor, played by Nicholas Hoult in James Gunn's Superman. Eisenberg (who's currently stumping for A Real Pain, which he directed, wrote, and co-starred in) got on the topic of Luthor with Dax Shepard for the latter's Armchair Expert podcast, revealing that, "I genuinely think it actually hurt my career in a real way."
Unsurprising to anyone who's ever heard him talk, Eisenberg expresses what sounds like genuine embarrassment over having concerns about the wounded state of his career, especially as it relates to superhero franchises. But, "the Batman movie was so poorly received, and I was so poorly received," he says, that he believes it genuinely cooled producers on casting him in other films, "because I was poorly received in something so public." Eisenberg also notes that there was a shock element to the whole thing: "I don’t read notices or reviews or movie press or anything," he noted, so the perception that he'd been a major part of a critical failure only slowly percolated up to him. "If you're in a huge, huge movie, and not seen as good, the people who are choosing who to put next in their movie are just not going to select you."
We'll note, in the interest of fairness, that a) while Batman V. Superman was pretty thoroughly drubbed by critics, it was a hit with audiences, making $874.4 million at the global box office, and b) while Eisenberg's performance as Luthor was definitely weird—our former film editor, the venerable A.A. Dowd, described it as a "millennial cokehead" version of the classic character—it's also energetic and watchable in ways that most of the movie wasn't. In any case, Eisenberg—whose battles with anxiety are a throughline in the interview, including several centered primarily on Michael Cera*—seems to be doing pretty well for himself these days; he got strong reviews for his work last year in Fleishman Is In Trouble, and A Real Pain has picked up four Golden Globe nominations as awards season starts kicking into high gear.
(*Eisenberg's Cera anxieties are manifold: He says he was bombarded by Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer with well-meaning videos of Cera being funny while Eisenberg was already busy freaking out over not being good enough for the 2009 zombie comedy, and once confronted in an ATM lobby by a fan who repeatedly insisted he must be Cera, until Eisenberg eventually agreed that, yes, he was. No one on this Earth is more haunted by Michael Cera than Jesse Eisenberg.)
