How Jesse Eisenberg Became a Poetic Beta-Male Bigfoot in Sasquatch Sunset

Courtesy of Bleecker Street Media

Welcome to the year of Jesse Eisenberg.

In January, A Real Pain—the second movie Eisenberg has written and directed, following last year's When You Finish Saving the World—sold to Searchlight Pictures for a reported $10 million in a Sundance bidding war. (The dramedy, starring Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin as cousins traveling to Poland for a Holocaust tour, will get a plum theatrical release on October 18, during the thick of awards season.) This month, Eisenberg plays a full-fledged Bigfoot in Sasquatch Sunset, his most unusual acting challenge in a career full of them. And later this year, he'll rejoin his fellow elite magicians to shoot the long-gestating Now You See Me 3. "I try to have my same level of depression so I don't have to chase this dragon again," Eisenberg jokes of his good fortune.

Sasquatch Sunset, opening April 12, finds Eisenberg caked head-to-toe in Sasquatch hair. His character—who is nameless, because, you know, he's a Sasquatch—is part of a small family living in the wilderness of northern California. The movie follows the beastly quartet over a year, during which they do many of the same things you and I do: eat, sleep, roam, poop, fornicate, weather day-to-day inconveniences. In between wacky walkabouts, their relationships give the film a gentle poignancy. If you didn't already know he was in it, you probably wouldn't recognize Eisenberg. But look closely to see and you'll spot his eyes in one of the bodysuits. The other peepers belong to Riley Keough, Nathan Zellner (who co-directed Sunset with his brother David), and Christophe Zajac-Denek.

The Zellners, longtime Sasquatch obsessives who first befriended Eisenberg at a Polish film festival in 2008, credit him for some of the movie's existence. After accepting the role, the Oscar nominee also signed on as a producer, helping to secure financing. "Nathan was always going to play the alpha," David says. "It made sense to have someone like Jesse be the softer Sasquatch, the beta. He described himself as the poet of the group."

Eisenberg talked to GQ about how he became a humanoid and what the buzz around A Real Pain means to him.

GQ: In preparing to talk to you, I was trying to imagine which films have been your most immersive and challenging acting experience. I have four candidates. In The Double, you play doppelgångers. In The Art of Self-Defense, you're a karate master. In Resistance, you're a mime. And in Sasquatch Sunset, you're a Sasquatch.

JESSE EISENBERG: My two favorite roles in films have been Art of Self-Defense and The Double. I just remember feeling like, This is the gift. I felt no anxiety. It just felt like pure fun. There is a great overlap with Sasquatch, which is that The Art of Self-Defense was produced by the Zellner brothers and even starred one of them, David. And there's a kind of tonal overlap, which is oddness driven with comic tones and a core of earnestness, and I just love that so much. The strange part about Sasquatch is that it was so unusual. We're in the makeup chair for two hours in the morning, and then you're in the suits that are quite constraining. When I read the script, it felt like I was reading The Double and The Art of Self-Defense. It was that joyous. And then acting in it was very physically taxing.

Your characters tend to be pretty hyper-verbal. They're often very articulate, wry, fast-talking. When you're playing a character that doesn't use words at all, where do you start?

A few things. This is not a silent movie, so it's not like we are performing as Buster Keaton types where we have to fully express things through the extreme manifestations of face-making. It doesn't feel like that big of a departure from a character who talks, except that the characters are not using similar human reasoning. It felt just as expressive, but in a more practical way.

We had a little bit of a Sasquatch boot camp in the Redwoods. We had a movement coach named Lorin Eric Salm, who actually worked with me on Resistance and studied under Marcel Marceau. We came up with a real language where different grunts or calls signify different things. We were tasked with coming up with things that would be consistent in our species but also things that made our characters different. My character is more of a poet. He's the beta male who's trying to win the affections of the lone female and getting shot down. Unlike the alpha, who becomes enraged when he's shot down, my character immediately takes it as a sign of his own inadequacy.

Were the sounds you developed robust enough to treat them like a language?

We probably didn't have more than 10 agreed-upon, specific sounds. Outside of those, we had what you could call improvisation vocalizations. Just to get through a specific interaction required all sorts of sounds—sounds that can manipulate, that can dominate, that can show supplication, that can show commiseration.

What was it like to see yourself in the mirror for the first time in the full-body garb?

The costumes were brilliantly designed by Steve Newburn, who runs this Canadian effects house. There was some problem with the costumes coming in through customs. I can imagine a thousand reasons why that would be the case. We got the costumes a little later than we wanted to, so we were all so eager to understand what it would be like to be living in these things. When we first tried it on, it was just this amazing relief that all of these eccentric behaviors that we had been practicing for the last week now have some real context. We were sitting around this production office without the costumes, eating raw salmon and stuffing our faces with greens and just lolling about in the way that we imagined these characters would.

The costume immediately made it make sense, but I've had that a lot with regular parts. I remember I was playing a villain in a Batman movie. The part was kind of open-ended, and then once the costume designer gave me these jackets that hit my leg in a certain way, it gave me the power and arrogance that was immediately helpful. This was just the extreme version of that.

Was it sweaty in that suit?

Yes. Imagine you're traveling to set at 4 in the morning and sitting in a chair while somebody glues every part of your face. Facial muscles that you didn't think you ever used are suddenly now glued with hair attached to them. Then, after an hour and 45 minutes of those strange, claustrophobic, itchy, sweaty prosthetics, you slip into a body suit that is made for somebody definitely smaller than you because it had to fit so snugly. There was not enough baby powder in the world to pour down these suits so that you wouldn't be drenched in sweat. Between takes or camera setups, we would be dousing ourselves with powder so you didn't chafe and it would soak up some of the moisture. There was a day when it was freezing rain. I'm not in that scene, but Riley and Christophe told me it was the only day they felt totally comfortable. The crew was feeling frozen and rained upon, but the actors in the Sasquatch suits finally felt a temperature that was tolerable.

What were lunch breaks like?

Lunch breaks were so difficult. We couldn't really eat normally because we had all of this hair around our mouth, and if you took any kind of normal bite of food, the hair would go in the mouth and the mustache would have to be redone. Every day was about finding some little shortcut. There was a day when Nathan realized, If I just take my mustache off from these specific areas, I can take real bites. But this is, like, week three of five. It was, how much can you pack in liquid form so that you can sustain energy but eat through a straw? I'm not asking for pity at all. It was just something I've never physically experienced in my life, and I'm speaking for all of the actors.

You're also out in nature, where everything is unpredictable. To what degree did scenes evolve in relation to what you encountered on location once cameras were rolling?

It was entirely unexpected. There's the first shot of the movie, where you see us walking across a field in a big wide shot. It's a long walk. We were walking separately, and when we all met up at the end of the walk, we were like, "Are you okay?" It was the most exhausting thing we've ever done, just to walk. And then by contrast, things that would seem difficult, like emoting and creating some kind of humor, felt much more natural. I think we were all a little embarrassed to say, like, "I need to lie down after a walk," because it seemed like such a petty thing to do, and yet it was wonderful to have others there to commiserate with. There are famous stories of Jim Carrey on The Grinch struggling with prosthetics. I totally understand the psychological claustrophobia he must have felt while giving a comic performance in a commercial movie. When you're going through something with a group, it's much easier.

What goes through your head during these scenes? Are you verbally coaching yourself through the nonverbal movement?

I never thought about it until you asked this, because our acting was initially conveyed in the script's vernacular. We had to interpret that in visceral physicality, so I think what you're saying is true, but maybe also the opposite was true. We're trying to remove the human element, remove the logic behind it, treat it as an animal would treat it. What the movie does so well is convey everything pretty clearly, but not in a way that feels explanatory. It just feels natural to these creatures.

During some of the weird, gross moments, did everyone just burst into laughter?

The funniest scene in the movie is when we find this paved road and we're so completely befuddled. We've never seen anything like this, and it's also this terrifying thing. We feel the need to instinctively dominate it, and so we start peeing on the road. It was so funny, just because it was such a technically arduous thing to do. There were tubes going through my suit and out my character's penis, and then it had to be pumped offscreen by somebody who was pumping the pee through it. At first, it was like a trickle, because there might have been a block in the tube. The Sasquatch is having this incredible epiphany where I feel like I need to dominate this road or it's going to attack us, and you get to the point where you're finally peeing and a steady stream comes out. It's hard not to laugh because you're just picturing what this thing looks like and how silly it is. We also defecate on the road. Feel free to not print this. As David Remnick once told me, because I write these comedy pieces for The New Yorker, "No one wants to read about urine over the breakfast table," so I'm conscious about this. But there was a blue tube—so the blue can be cut out in postproduction—near where our behinds were. It was a mystery as to how the defecation was going to emerge because sometimes it emerged with great force and sometimes it was a trickle. Either way, it was hysterically funny.

You mentioned not operating in a Buster Keaton mode, whereas I'd assumed silent film might be a reference point for this. Was there a different analog you looked at?

When I did the movie The Double that you mentioned, Richard Ayoade, the director, had sent me Buster Keaton movies, and I totally understood what he wanted. There was a certain kind of heightened physicality. But with this, we were watching footage of apes. It started making me think of my relationship with my old dog. I just loved this dog, Tara, and my favorite thing was walking Tara. When Tara peed, Tara cocked her head to the side in this seemingly very contemplative way, and just had this stare, as though the most profound thoughts were going through her head. I don't know what thoughts were going through her head, but it was this thing: a creature that was not on our human level of intelligence seemed to be experiencing deep thoughts. That was more inspiring to me than anything that Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton did. When we pee, probably most people are looking at their cellphones or something, but we so rarely indulge in the amazing pleasure of relieving ourselves. The Sasquatches don't have the need to look at their phone, so they actually are taking pleasure in the visceral experience of being alive.

Was Tara a childhood dog?

Yeah, I was 12, 13, 14. Tara was a golden retriever, just this sweet creature that everybody fell in love with because she was both docile but energetic and loving. The character I play in this movie has that kind of quality. When the alpha wants to mate with the female, it's quite aggressive and gross and off-putting, and she's turned off to it. And yet I'm so timid that when I want to mate with her I bring her a bouquet of flowers. She slaps them out of my hands, and I just walk off completely ashamed. How can you not fall in love with that kind of character? We all understand what that feels like.

Let's touch on A Real Pain before our time ends. You used to say in interviews that you weren't that interested in directing. Then you made When You Finish Saving the World. What did that experience leave you hungry to do?

It's complicated. When I'm writing something, I'm not really thinking so much about the filmmaking aspect of it because my background is in playwriting and essays and stuff like that. In terms of directing, I very much want to get better. I think of getting better in terms of craft and skill set, management style, technical aspects. These are things that I really need to grow into, and I could sense myself getting better.

It's hard to articulate exactly how, but for my next movie, which we're getting set up now, I want to push myself cinematically. What I love about A Real Pain is the characters. They are characters I've lived with for years. There are versions of these characters in plays that I've written. But I want to work in tones like The Art of Self-Defense that push the genre and the world without treading on broad-comedy or horror tropes. I think of myself as a writer first. I feel so fortunate that I've been given these opportunities. It's only because I'm a known actor that I was allowed to direct these movies. I don't have a calling card, like some amazing short film. I really feel like I hit the lottery in being able to do this stuff. I'm aware of my extreme, extreme fortune, and I'm trying to live up to it by getting better.

In light of all that, what did it mean to you for the movie to sell at the figure that it did and to now be getting an awards-friendly release date?

To me, it's just as confusing as to why people don't like certain things I've made. When you make something, you think, Oh, this is exactly what I want to express in this year of my life. It's so specific to my tastes and interests. Some things are hated, and then some things, like this movie, are loved. My dad always tells me, "This is not going to be the norm. The norm is going to be things that don't connect, because for everything to connect, a million things have to work out." If you have four of these in your career, it's a great success. I guess that's arguably a pessimistic way of looking at the world, but it's what keeps me going, because otherwise I'd be destroyed by getting terrible notices for certain things. I've had certain plays that people didn't like. Some people—critics I respect and admire—didn't like my last movie. That's just as baffling as those same people liking A Real Pain. It tells me that if you want to have a life in the arts, you have to be able to move forward so that you're not either celebrating too much or dwelling too much on previous things.

Originally Appeared on GQ