Update: Variety have confirmed that Eisenberg’s on board as Will, the pizza delivery guy. Just remember we reported his involvement first. The film will go in front of cameras in July and is scheduled to hit theaters next year on August 12, 2011. This will be a nice stretch for Eisenberg. Will is much more the fuck-up character of the film and Aziz Ansari is the straight man. In fact, when we first read it we assumed Danny McBride would be playing Will.
Jesse Eisenberg is having a pretty great few years. Ever since his debut in “Roger Dodger,” he’s made consistently interesting choices, including his fine performance in Noah Baumbach’s “The Squid and the Whale,” and last year he had a storming double bill in Greg Mottola’s wonderful “Adventureland,” and the horror-comedy “Zombieland,” the latter providing the actor with the biggest hit of his career so far.
Excellent buzz is already circling David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” in which Eisenberg plays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and it now looks like he’s got another big role lined up for next summer. The current issue of Production Weekly (Issue 714, p.1, subscribers only online) suggests that the actor may be teaming up with his “Zombieland” director Ruben Fleischer to take a lead role in the action-comedy “30 Minutes Or Less.”
Eisenberg is in talks to play Will in the project, one of the two leads, alongside the previously cast Aziz Ansari, who plays Chet. As we revealed when we looked at the script a little while ago, the pair are best friends who fall out after Will confesses that he’s in love with Chet’s sister. Shortly afterwards, however, he becomes tied up with a pair of white-trash criminals (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson, the latter of whom came on board last week, alongside Michael Pena as a ‘tattooed assassin’), who strap a home-made bomb to Will and force him to rob a bank for them.
We enjoyed the script when we read it, finding it not dissimilar to “Pineapple Express” but with more heart to it. Fleischer’s debut was deeply promising, and he’s assembled an extremely exciting cast here; assuming Eisenberg signs on (and he doesn’t have anything else lined up at present, so it seems likely), the central pairing of him and Ansari seems ripe with comic potential. Filming kicks off in July for a release on August 20 in 2011.
Original story posted 5/24/10, 1:15pm