Interview

There is a special place in American cinema reserved for a certain variety of self-doubting, sexually clumsy, hyperintellectual young man. Perhaps it was Woody Allen who first carved out a niche in film for men nursing this particular cocktail of neuroses. Whatever its origins, the archetype exists, and for a new generation of movie fans, actor Jesse Eisenberg appears to have taken awkward, unsteady hold of the baton. (Of course—these guys are never athletic.)

Born in Queens, New York, and raised in New Jersey, the 26-year-old Eisenberg began performing professionally as a teen, and even did a run on Broadway in a 1996 revival of the Tennessee Williams play Summer and Smoke. But it’s Eisenberg’s film work—punctuated by performances in Dylan Kidd’s Roger Dodger (2002), Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005), and this year’s Adventureland (in which he co-starred alongside this issue’s cover girl, Kristen Stewart)—that is most responsible for his reputation as an overthinking young woman’s sex symbol. Yes, Eisenberg does self-conscious and nebbishy well. But his characters never come off as simply neurotic or tragic—instead, they’re quasi-heroic, which is a credit to Eisenberg’s knack for finding the little iron man inside each of them.

In his next film, Kevin Tyler Asche’s Holy Rollers, Eisenberg plays an Ecstasy-dealing Hasidic Jew. But he can currently be seen alongside his interviewer, Woody Harrelson, as a zombie-slaying survivalist in the horror-comedy Zombieland.