Claire Danes and Jesse Eisenberg on Happy Marriages and 'Fleishman Is In Trouble'

"Fleishman Is In Trouble" stars Claire Danes and Jesse Eisenberg reflect on what makes marriages work in real life and onscreen.

Claire Danes and Jesse Eisenberg's characters in Fleishman Is in Trouble weren't lucky in love.

The Homeland actress and The Social Network star play newly divorced couple Rachel and Toby Fleishman in the series adaptation of Taffy Brodesser-Akner's 2019 bestselling novel. 

"What's interesting about this show is they think at the onset that they're winding up with the right person for 1,000 reasons," Eisenberg tells Parade.com in an exclusive interview with Danes. "These are like smart, analytical people who think 10 steps ahead in their business—but just couldn't foresee the cracks."

Both Danes and Eisenberg, who are married to Hugh Dancy and Anna Strout, respectively, believe that luck contributes to a successful marriage. "I think a lot of it's luck and it's also a living, evolving thing, right? I think it's an amazing way to kind of get feedback about who you are. I think it's just a natural impulse," Danes says.

"It's just how we're designed, but it's also, you know, it's something that you have to constantly cultivate and nourish and explore," she continues. "I mean, you have to be very active within it. And if you stop doing that, it might not survive, right?"

Continue reading to find out what Claire Danes and Jesse Eisenberg told Parade.com about their new FX limited series Fleishman Is in Trouble, which premieres Nov. 17 on Hulu.

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Fleishman Is in Trouble is about life, marriage, dissatisfaction and wanting to feel accepted—What was it about the show that drew you to the project?

Danes: What you said! I just thought it was kind of an amazing portrait of a relationship. Also a point in our lives, you're in this kind of mid-life zone. And yeah, seeing it in this kind of kaleidoscopic way through all these different myriad vantage points—I just thought it was a really surprising format, and a very effective one, very probing and evocative. I happen to have read the book before it was offered to me and was very moved by it, so it was an easy "yes" when it came my way.

Eisenberg: My favorite thing about it is my favorite thing about all drama, which is that it allows you to see a particular story from multiple perspectives. Sometimes that happens in kind of implicit ways where your allegiance as you're watching something kind of shifts from character to character, but in this, it happens in this very explicit way where you're watching the show, and you realize that it's being told from my perspective with my skewed version of the marriage. Then this incredible thing happens later in the series where you see the show from Claire's character's perspective, and all of those things that you thought made me the hero and her the villain are kind of switched on their head, but in a realistic way. You see the same scenes that you saw from my perspective now from her perspective, and they seem just far more sympathetic to her, and you see me as this kind of aloof, self-centered guy rather than this put-upon, sweet hero.

The show really drives home the point that there are two sides to every story. What was the most challenging part of playing Rachel and Toby for you?

Danes: For me, it was that there was this great dichotomy. She's so polished and she's so composed, like almost aggressively so, but she's actually deeply fractured under that facade of intense competence. So kind [of] balancing those two truths, I think was the trick of it for me. And also just the tone of the story is a little unusual. It's comic and also quite raw, so being able to kind of move fluidly in those different directions was an enjoyable challenge.

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Eisenberg: For me some of the difficulty is, when I play a character that is quite similar to me, I find I'm far more self-critical because I know the nuances of this thing so well cause it's kind of in me ... You have like a heightened sense of where you're not being completely accurate. So I find that a struggle. But the other thing with this is that the character is similar to me and then different in some really fundamental ways.

Taffy, who wrote the book and who wrote this series, summarizes Toby at the end that he would kind of get close to being self-aware and then run screaming from it, and it was something for me as an actor—who's as a person very self-reflective, self-critical—I don't mean those as wonderful attributes. I mean those as like kind of obsessive, neurotic attributes—but Toby has like a bit of a mental block on his own self-reflection in the way he's written. I thought, "Oh, that's really interesting," because he comes very close to being me, and then there's this strange block, and so the weird thing is that the character is so close to me. I think when people watch it who you know me they'll think, "Oh, that's like a very similar character to the Jesse that we know." But there is this strange lack of self-reflection that Taffy includes so wonderfully in the series that for me was just a struggle to relate to, 'cause otherwise he seems like a very analytical, thoughtful person.

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These two characters seem totally incompatible, yet they say they never misrepresented themselves... What do you think went wrong for Toby and Rachel?

Danes: I think they had a natural kinship that was genuine. And I think they didn't know themselves very well when they entered this union. And I think what was initially comfortable was they got to certain points along the way where they were kind of challenged and stretched, and they just didn't have the personal resources to understand how to meet those challenges, certainly not together. And I think that Rachel really underestimated the trauma that she had experienced as a kid and was quite dormant, and it didn't take much to stimulate it, to activate it and when that happens she's so unmoored. It happens a couple of times, and she doesn't fully address it, and she certainly doesn't know how to bring it to Toby. And he can't see it. He can't intuit himself. There were certain critical points on the line that they didn't respond sufficiently to together. I don't know.

Eisenberg: I agree. And there's this wonderful part in the third episode, which so explicitly telegraphs the thing you had asked about, which is that like, I see her on the phone kind of yelling at somebody and I'm so, like, impressed by it. Like I'm married to this incredible woman who stands up for herself, who doesn't feel the need to apologize for everything—so different than what I conceived of my relationship in my life being. Then you see this very quick progression of her yelling at people on the phone to turning into, as he sees it, this irredeemable monster of ambition—and that's from [his] skewed, probably sexist perspective on what [he] wants his wife to be. But it's really wonderful, because you see how the thing he loves starts to turn into the thing he hates. And then similarly, when the story shifts so amazingly to her perspective, you see that my neglect of her is the thing that turns her into this thing that he thinks he didn't want.

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I'd love to hear what marriage means to you and what you think makes a marriage successful.

Eisenberg: I mean, probably a lot of luck to wind up with the right person. And what's interesting about this show is they think at the onset that they're winding up with the right person for 1,000 reasons. These are like smart, analytical people who think 10 steps ahead in their business—but just couldn't foresee the cracks. And so, some of it is I guess is just luck, you know, that you wind up with the right person.

I think in the case of us personally, we feel like that happened and we feel so lucky and fortunate and, you know, it feels in some ways out of our hands. But in the show, you see that what was once a wonderful union—for a series of reasons that probably have nothing to do with the evils of these people—it just didn't work.

Danes: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it's luck and it's also a living, evolving thing, right? I think it's an amazing way to kind of get feedback about who you are. I think it's just a natural impulse. It's just how we're designed, but it's also something that you have to constantly cultivate and nourish and explore. I mean, you have to be very active within it. And if you stop doing that, it might not survive, right??

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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