Created for television by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who adapted her acclaimed novel of the same name, the eight-episode FX original series Fleishman is in Trouble (which is available to stream at Hulu), follows Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg), a recently divorced single dad of two, an 11-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son, who’s navigating the world of app-based dating, rekindling friendships with Libby (Lizzy Caplan) and Seth (Adam Brody), and learning unexpected things he never knew about his wife, Rachel (Claire Danes). As he attempts to understand how his marriage fell apart in the first place, he must also move forward and find a new balance between parenting, career success, and personal fulfillment.
During this interview with Collider, co-stars Eisenberg and Danes talked about how they related to their characters, what Eisenberg learned about dating apps during his research, how Rachel needed to come to terms with her root trauma in order to become more self-possessed, that learning about both sides of this relationship provides a much fuller awareness of their experiences, how the shoot resulted in Eisenberg getting COVID, and how playing characters that aren’t that far off from you can more easily bleed into real life.
Collider: As actors, I would imagine that you sign onto projects that you connect with in some way, whether it’s something with a story or with a character that you want to explore. What was it that got you most interested in this and made you want to take on what you would have to take on with this character?
JESSE EISENBERG: Yeah, I felt like I could relate to Toby’s experience so well, and I just loved his righteousness. He’s somebody that’s not only in the throes of a horrible divorce, but somebody who, even before that, thinks that his ethical rubric is exactly right, and I just love that. It’s something I aspire to, to have the confidence of one’s own ethics. It’s something that’s similar to me, but different enough that I can imagine how I would be in those circumstances. But what I most loved about this story, from an outsider’s perspective, is just the way it talks about marriage from these different perspectives. So, the first part of the show, you’re seeing this breakdown of this horrible marriage from my character’s perspective. You think, “Wow, this guy is the hero, and his wife is just this miserable, toxically ambitious, neglectful partner.” And then, the show shifts, and you see that what you’ve actually been seeing is so skewed and based in an antiquated narrative about male sympathy. I just thought that was brilliant.
CLAIRE DANES: Yeah. Similarly, as a 43-year-old married woman of two who lives in New York City, it was hard not to relate to what was on those pages, but I thought it was a very surprising exploration and interrogation of a relationship. It had this kaleidoscopic quality because you got to experience it from so many different vantage points.
Jesse, because your character is divorced, he decides to put himself out there with dating apps. You’ve talked about how that’s not an experience you had, so did you do any kind of research about that or talk to friends? It seems like you’d be able to find a never-ending amount of horrible experiences from people.
EISENBERG: Yes, it blew my mind. What’s amazing about being an actor is that you can just tell people, “Hey, I’m doing a show about this, can I see your Match profile,” or whatever, and people allowed me to look through the thing because I was doing the show, and they knew what it was about. It’s just so overwhelming. It terrified me, especially as somebody who values their privacy. Because of the nature of my work, I value my privacy so much. To then see people having to put so much personal information out there about themselves and make themselves so vulnerable by saying, “Please, I’m looking for a partner.” You’re overwhelmed by it. And when my character, who’s been this married guy that’s lived in what he thought was a very stable relationship, he enters into this world, and it just overwhelms him. He starts to indulge in it, and then soon thereafter, he finds it to be this uncomfortably monotonous, uneventful, unhappy world.
Claire, one of the things that I found interesting about Rachel, and about watching your performance, is that we see how profoundly fractured things have become for her, but how she always presents herself as able to handle it all. Do you feel like she even had herself convinced? Did she know how broken she had become?
DANES: No, she had no idea. She was very disconnected from the root trauma, and I think that trauma had been activated at different points in her life. She was thrown, but never fully, so she certainly didn’t resolve the problem. She poked the bear. It roared, and she retreated into coping mechanisms, and she doubled down on the tools that had helped her when she was overwhelmed, as a little girl. She became that much more self-possessed, and much more doggedly ambitious and myopic. That was effective for a while, but eventually, it’s exposed as being fairly flimsy, and she completely falls apart, which is harrowing and tragic, but hopefully essential in allowing her to finally face the big beast. I would like to imagine that she is better for it, but it’s just so sad that they couldn’t do that together and that she had to do it alone.
As the one that was exploring her from the inside, how do you feel about the way the audience will learn about Rachel and get to know her?
DANES: The construction of the story is true to the book. We have to spend a lot of time with her, as seen by Toby, and that is a very unflattering portrait. You just have to trust that the audience will stay with her long enough to finally discover what’s underneath that cold exterior. She is alienating, for a very long time.
Jesse, one of the stand-out moments, for me, in this whole rollercoaster of emotion, came after Toby had to take his kids out of camp, and they were driving home. What was it like to do that scene in the car, when the kids are singing “Fight Song” and you’re listening to them singing together? How many times did you have to hear them do that?
EISENBERG: Well, that wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was that was the scene where I got COVID.
Oh, God.
EISENBERG: Yeah, in that car, in that scene, from that singing. So, what I remember most, so much, is not the monotony of that song. In fact, I think my memory was affected by the COVID that I got in that scene, so I don’t remember the song.
DANES: You really got COVID in that car?
EISENBERG: In that scene, in that car, on that day. (To Claire) I can tell you how I know that after. But I loved the camp stuff, taking the kids out of camp and standing up for my daughter. It was so sweet. I have a young child, so this was a little role-playing of how to stand up for the kids and what’s too much. And the kids in the show are so wonderful. They’re so great and sweet.
DANES: But they did give you COVID.
EISENBERG: I’m not saying who I got it from. I’m just saying it happened in that scene, in that car, on that day.
DANES: They are wonderful. They're so gifted. What was asked of them was pretty intense, and they just delivered effortlessly, every time. They’re sweet kids who are very talented.
When you play characters like this, do you think about what could happen to them, after you finished with them, or do you just leave them behind when you’re done playing them?
EISENBERG: When the characters are pretty close, but not exact, it’s confusing. When you’re playing a character that’s pretty extreme, you don’t relate it to your own life. This was interesting role-play. It’s hard to describe. It feels like drama school or something. When you play a character that’s similar enough, it’s confusing. My character is pretty self-righteous and not self-aware. Taffy [Brodesser-Akner] writes in the story that Toby would come close to being self-aware, and then run screaming from it. I think I became that, a little bit. Claire and I probably both felt it. When you’re bickering on set all day with each other, in a way that is not that markedly dissimilar from a conversation you might have with your significant other, that little thing infects, and it doesn’t feel that dissimilar. I don’t view my wife in any of the same way Toby views Rachel, but I would go home and say certain things that overlapped with the thing I said for 12 hours on set.
DANES: You fall into the habit of a certain pattern. It becomes a little infectious and not a great thing to bring home.
Fleishman is in Trouble is available to stream at Hulu.