film / tv / substack / social media / lists / web / celeb / pajiba love / misc / about / cbr
film / tv / substack / web / celeb

jesse-eisenberg-y-kristen-stewart.jpg

Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg are Delightful, Real-Life Human Beings

By Grainger Heavensbee | Celebrity | August 17, 2015 |

By Grainger Heavensbee | Celebrity | August 17, 2015 |


Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg — two very good actors whose talent we in the celebrity-driven culture like to ignore in favor of the “gossip” — are not always the most beloved people in Hollywood. That’s not their fault, as much as it is ours: They deliver thousands of words, and we have a tendency to cherry-pick the ones that deliver the most page views, because we are terrible people.

Nevertheless, the two together are an endless delight, as evidenced in Adventureland, in the gender-swapping fake interview they conducted the other day, and the latest Mike Ryan interview over on Uproxx.

Mr. Ryan is not one for the kind of “gotcha” questions that elicit the sort of quotes that make Internet headlines, so you have to read the entire interview to get a good feel for Eisenberg and Stewart together. My biggest takeaway, however, is that Eisenberg and Stewart are very good at humanizing themselves, if only people would listen.

Take this exchange, for instance, where Kristen Stewart takes issue with celebrity coverage on the Internet (Full Disclosure: We trade in celebrity coverage on the Internet):

I love how people like to make statements as if they’re feigning true passion, when really they’re just using you opportunistically to get hits on their website. And I’m like, oh, cool, so you pretend like you care about something where you don’t have a thought - you don’t even have a fucking thought about any of it. It’s literally just, “She said one word? Enter it. Fucking harpoon her.”

You mean, like, when Jesse Eisenberg compared Comic Con to genocide?

Eisenberg: Right. But if you let that kind of stuff govern your decisions, you’d probably never leave the house, let alone act in a thing. So you can’t. It hurts my feelings terribly, but I guess not enough.

We’re the worst.

But also, no one is more guilty of feigning surprise every time Kristen Stewart turns in a marvelous performance than we are. And why do we continue to fall into that trap?

Stewart: Twilight is so huge. Do you know what I mean? Because Twilight infiltrated everyone’s [perception]. I think if you walked into a grocery store and asked somebody if they saw Clouds of Sils Maria or Twilight, they’d probably be like, “Twilight, and she’s a terrible fucking actress.”

Eisenberg: I think if you’re in a really popular thing, it gives people license to criticize you. Not because of the thing for which they are criticizing you, which is not being good for whatever the person is doing in the thing. But just by virtue of that thing being very successful and it’s human instinct to take down that what is successful.

Stewart: It’s just instinct, exactly.

Eisenberg: Any criticism of something in that is usually separate from what the criticism is.

Stewart: I also feel that anything overtly popular in the United States feels entirely owned by the public, therefore if they don’t deem it worthy, then they’re like, “We put you here. And if you do not bend over and give us absolutely everything we want, then we need to let you know.” They become vindictive. They’re like, “Excuse me…”

Don’t mind us. We’re just going to go over here and self-flagellate while you guys read the rest of Ryan’s interview.

self-flagellation.gif