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The lengths to which some actors will go to prepare for a role!
For the new film “Holy Rollers,” 26-year-old actor Jesse Eisenberg became a bar mitzvah. The movie is based on events in the late 1990s when members of the Chasidic community were recruited as drug mules.
Mr. Eisenberg, who was raised in East Brunswick, N.J., and calls himself an “inconsistent” Jew, researched the role at Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn.
“They asked me if I’d been bar mitzvahed,” he told the Jewish Forward. “So they went through the process—the tefillin, reading the prayers. It was over in about 10 minutes, and then I guess I was a man.”
In the movie, he plays a young Chassid whose neighbor recruits him to bring back “medicine” from Europe that turns out to be ecstasy.
“My character, Sam, is kind of lost,” said Mr. Eisenberg, who previously starred in “The Squid And The Whale” and “Zombieland.” “He’s on the verge of adulthood and doesn’t have a path. That is completely relatable. … The characters that exploit Judaism to smuggle drugs are the antagonists. The film doesn’t present them as representative of the entire group. Every society in every civilization has had bad apples.”