Jessie Eisenberg on Julianne Moore's Unmatched Range in 'A Real Pain'

In a recent interview, Jessie Eisenberg praised Julianne Moore for her exceptional performance in their upcoming film 'A Real Pain', highlighting her ability to portray characters with both depth and surrealism. Eisenberg notes that Moore's range is unmatched, allowing her to seamlessly embody diverse personas while maintaining authenticity. The film, centered around a New Jersey housewife's transformation through a local musical, showcases Moore's unique acting style that blends the human with the otherworldly. —a film about a stripped-down, intimate rehearsal of Anton Chekhov's play—and she remembers being put in charge of waking up her castmate Brooke Smith and driving her to the airport. She even met Ken Burns that year. Three decades later, he was back in town, too, and he remembered her. "I think about the distance that I've come from not knowing even what it was," says Moore, "to now, where there's so many of the people I've collaborated with and people's work that I admire. " Of course, most everyone recognizes the Oscar-winning acting icon now. As we walk through the cozy halls of a hotel in Mountain Village, several people stop to greet her or express love for her work. She's back this year with's charming, funny, surreal movie about a New Jersey housewife who gets a role in the local musical, and transforms during the process. It's a tour-de-force performance—and one that Eisenberg knew only Moore could deliver. 'There's not an actress on this earth that can play something so simultaneously alien and human,' Eisenberg tells'She's so good and she's so weird. I've gotten to do that in two movies and it's my favorite acting style in the world, but no one's better than her. ' Moore's range is unmatched; she has the incredible ability to authentically be so many different women at the same time. We've seen it injust to name a few. She can do earnestness without armor, she can do melodrama, she can do repression, she can do unraveling, and it never feels forced or strained. The role in, which A24 will release in theaters on Dec. 11, on his own experiences in local musical theater growing up, but wrote the part for Moore. He'd first worked with her on his directorial debut,which came out in 2022. He remembers he had to delay the shoot six months when Moore landed a role in the adaptation of the hit Broadway musical It was a major departure from her previous work because it was the first-ever role she'd done in which she'd have to sing. 'She would tell me all the time how she loved musicals and she would love to sing,' says Eisenberg. Eisenberg thinks maybe subconsciously he so wanted to work with her again that he ended up writing a musical for her. 'What seemed like really organic things in the movie, some of it was just like, 'can I get her to sign on to this? '' he says. 'That's how much I love her and that's how much I was obsessed with this character. ' Mona starts out as a relatively ordinary woman who decides on a whim to audition for a local production of fictional musical). When he pushes her to inhabit the character , she takes that direction to the extreme, becoming a crazed method actor in a film that becomes more and more surreal and absurdist as it goes along. When Moore was sent Eisenberg's script, she was in awe. 'It's one of the best scripts I've ever read in my entire life,' she says. "On page 30, I stood up and had to walk around my dining room for a second and catch my breath. 'hadn't: sing live, badly, in front of seasoned stage actors and singers. The supporting cast includes Tony nominee Colton Ryan, Tony winner Bonnie Milligan, singer-song-writer Halle Bailey, and stage legend and two-time Tony winner. When Moore had to film the first live-singing number she felt like 'I was going to swallow my own tongue. And the looks on their faces when they're all worried, that was kind of what the atmosphere was like,' she says. 'So it was just an amazing creative challenge. ' At the beginning of the film, Mona is meek and untrained. 'It's not hard for me to be a bad singer," Moore says dryly. But as Mona grows in confidence, Moore has to perform her main number— an original song written by Eisenberg titled 'This City May Have Chewed Me Up "—with much more skill and gusto. And she delivers, with star power, joy, and comedy. Eisenberg says he noticed something about Moore when watching the film at Telluride that he hadn't seen before. When she performs the number for the second time, about halfway through the movie, you see the first hint of skill and confidence, Moore is using her throat, not her chest. But when she performs it again later in the film, Moore uses her chest, as a seasoned singer would. 'It's such a small thing, but musical theater people would understand that that character is making an evolution from something that is instinctive and incorrect to something that is learned and better,' he says. Midway through the film, there's a scene so wild that it sparked boisterous applause from the audience. In it, Giamatti and Moore are facing off, as Jerry pushes Mona to go deeper into her character. Moore knew the scene, which is essentially a long, intense monologue, would loom large for her, and so did Eisenberg. Anticipating how actors spiral before a scene like that, Eisenberg offered her a teleprompter well in advance so she wouldn't spend three weeks silently panicking. 'All of us as actors, whenever we have a big piece of material, we just worry it, worry it, worry it—and drill it,' says Moore. 'And so this allowed me to work on it normally without having to do some weird obsessive drilling. ' Then, the day of, she didn't want or need the teleprompter at all. Moore credits Eisenberg for knowing all along that she wouldn't need it on the day. 'I was relaxed enough that I absorbed the language without being scared,' she says. 'I was like, 'He's a fucking genius! ''. 'I was obsessed with getting this character on screen and the only person who could do it was her,' says director Jesse Eisenberg of Moore.. She had auditioned, but didn't get any of the main parts, so she was cast as 'the little red-haired girl,' a part that's usually offstage. 'I remember how hard it was. I had to eat a sandwich and I was so scared,' says Moore. 'It's really hard to eat when you're scared because your mouth is dry. ' Moore wasn't good at sports and hadn't made the drill team, so she joined the after-school drama club, where she found her people. It wasn't about pursuing an acting career at that point— it was about belonging. 'That feeling of being with all the rest of the weirdos, the other people that didn't make drill team,' she says. 'This is for all of the people who wore the costumes to the mall for the after-party. " Moore's musical theater career ended in high school, but she's always loved the medium. 'It's as if your feelings are so big in a musical that words no longer sustain you, you have to sing,' she says. 'There's something about that that's really beautiful. ' It's a full-circle moment for Moore to be back in Telluride 32 years after her first visit, playing a woman who wants so badly to be onstage.chronicled Moore and a group of actors who would perform Chekhov's work on a bare stage over the course of several years. Though Moore would go on to perform in some off-Broadway productions in the '80s and early '90s, she hasn't had much time for the stage lately, appearing on Broadway for the last time in 2006 when she starred in, a modern retelling of the Greek myth that will debut off Broadway next year. 'What always draws me to stuff, I realize, is the quality of the writing,' she says. 'And this was the first play I had read in a long time that kind of made me go, 'Oh, I really want to do that. '' When she starts rehearsals in January, it will have been 20 years since she stood on the stage. Maybe a little bit of Mona will join her there.podcast. She covers film, TV, and the culture and business of Hollywood. She's written cover stories on Margot Robbie and Priyanka Chopra-Jonas, and attended festivals around the world, including Telluride, Cannes, ... Before its TIFF premiere, Mirren opens up about embodying literature's most uncompromising misanthrope in Anton Corbijn's new film.and beyond, and talks about how she poured her grief and fear into her new movie: 'There was art imitating life for sure. 'The actor and writer opens up about her sweeping Netflix series, a more complete adaptation of the novel than her grandfather Elia Kazan's seminal movie, starring Florence Pugh, Christopher Abbott, and Mike Faist. 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