In Fleishman Is in Trouble, Claire Danes and Jesse Eisenberg play two halves of a splintered couple. Photo / Thea Traff, The New York Times
The actors share a doomed union in this new series. In a joint interview, they discuss their own marriages and how it felt to depict such a contentious one.
Marriage, actress Claire Danes insisted, means sacrificing certain freedoms.
“That’s one of the great gifts of it,” she said. “But sometimes that shoe feels a little snug. There are moments when you’re like, ‘Actually, I would go in a different direction here.’”
“For me, I’m just so happy to have a shoe on,” said Jesse Eisenberg, her work husband.
In Fleishman Is in Trouble, FX’s limited-series adaptation of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s 2019 novel, Danes, 43, and Eisenberg, 39, star as Rachel and Toby Fleishman. Long married and recently separated, the Fleishmans — she’s a high-powered talent agent; he’s a hepatologist — inhabit the upper echelons of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The first two episodes arrive in New Zealand on Disney+ on November 17.
On a recent afternoon, Danes (Homeland, The Essex Serpent) and Eisenberg (The Social Network, When You Finish Saving the World) met in an office at FX’s Manhattan headquarters with a Fleishman-like view of mid-rises and water towers. Danes is married to actor Hugh Dancy, Eisenberg to educator Anna Strout. But for about six months — despite having met only once more than a decade before, when Eisenberg was extremely high — they had to pretend to be married to each other in a show that shadows one union from early courtship to eventual implosion and beyond, tracing its breakdown with granular specificity and occasional double vision.
The novel argues that “beyond your point of view lies an abyss with a bubbling cauldron of fire, and that just beyond that abyss lies your spouse’s point of view.” And so the show, directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, themselves married, stages some scenes from Rachel’s point of view and some from Toby’s.
How was it playing a couple locked in a cycle of neglect, reproach and retaliation? “Very comfortable, actually,” Danes said, kicking off her Jimmy Choos. Eisenberg, on the opposite end of the sofa, agreed: “She’s the greatest.”
They had a terrific work marriage, Danes confirmed, while “depicting a very bad, unhealthy, unnatural one”.
In an hour’s chat, as the autumn light outside the window turned the city golden, the two actors discussed marriage, divorce and dodgeball. These are excerpts from the conversation.
Did you know each other before this?
JESSE EISENBERG: We did.
CLAIRE DANES: I didn’t remember.
EISENBERG: It’s a funny story.
DANES: Tell the story.
EISENBERG: My [future] wife took me to some benefit thing in Brooklyn, probably 15 years ago. I was the most stoned I’ve ever been. I was just talking to this woman, and I’m like, “I’ve met my soul mate.” I ran over to Anna. I was like, “That woman is amazing.” She was like, “That’s Claire Danes, good luck.”
So you met once. Then suddenly here you are, married. This show is such an intimate appraisal of a marriage. Can anyone on the outside ever understand what goes on inside a marriage?
DANES: I think the people in it barely understand, and it changes over time. It is an astonishing invention. It’s imperfect. But I personally don’t have a better model. I am attracted to it and fascinated by it and find it a very worthwhile pursuit. It’s a way to continue exploring who you are and where you are.
EISENBERG: It’s also an attractive prospect for me. The alternative is not interesting or desirable. My wife and I have had probably the same dynamic for the many, many years we’ve been together, the same arguments and the same joys. The TV show presents that. Except that this is a doomed marriage.
DANES: In my actual relationship, when we were met with a certain level of stress that we were ill-equipped to cope with, we had to develop techniques and strategies and skills to become a better-functioning couple. Our characters were not able to do that. They got swallowed by points on their continuum that were just too hard. And they didn’t have the self-awareness or the self-possession or the guts to be honest with each other. They just retreated further and further.
When you were preparing for these roles, did you sit down and map out what this relationship had been, what their history was?
DANES: Not really. We had a few dinners with Taffy and the cast, which were valuable. And we had rehearsals, abbreviated but dense, which were really effective because of these exercises that Jon and Val offered us. Writing exercises, primarily, which was very annoying, because Jesse is an actual writer and an excellent one. I was like, “This isn’t fair.”
EISENBERG: I thought iambic pentameter was appropriate.
DANES: But it did provide a lot of insight. Then we played dodgeball. I was wearing clogs, which I don’t recommend.
What do you think Rachel and Toby saw in each other in the first place?
DANES: They do, actually, really like each other. They have easy, happy chemistry. They probably share a sense of humour. And they did have similar values once upon a time. He was her first true friend ever. I don’t think she would have left him had he not insisted on it.
EISENBERG: The thing that attracts you to the person is what’s different about them. But that’s also what becomes their undoing, because the chasm between my character’s value system and hers is too wide.
DANES: Are your parents still together?
EISENBERG: My parents are married.
DANES: My parents, too. They’ve been married for 55 years or something like that. They met at 18. At RISD [Rhode Island School of Design]. And they’re still very in love.
So how was it being married to each other for the camera?
DANES: Very joyful. I love working with Jesse. He’s very gifted and very present and profoundly, almost pathologically generous — truly, really. And just an amazingly playful partner. It was so much fun tearing into each other.
EISENBERG: That felt right, too. It felt good.
DANES: What’s extraordinary about the novel and now this interpretation of it, it’s very comic, but it’s also quite raw and wrenching. Threading that needle is fun but a challenge. Rachel was tough for me, because she was so intensely polished in some ways and so profoundly fractured in others. Figuring out how to co-ordinate that was the trick of it. There are episodes where we hear his account, then we get hers. We shot those scenes, one after the other — that was very strange. It was like an acting exercise. It’s a matter of degrees.
EISENBERG: Exactly. She would be 10 per cent more hateful, more stubborn. Then my character would be more aloof and unaware of her pain.
So these were small changes.
DANES: But consequential.
Do you think you could be married to each other in real life?
EISENBERG: When I met Claire at that benefit, I immediately ran over to tell my wife that, yes, I could be married to that person.
DANES: And he was right, in a way. A little prescient there.
Parts of the show are very light, very funny; other parts are more intense. Did you take any of that home with you?
DANES: It’s funny: With Homeland, the character was so very other, so alien, it was easy to compartmentalise. I got a little cocky about it. This one was a lot closer, a lot more reminiscent. Playing a married person with kids, I was at greater risk of taking it home than I have been with other projects, which surprised me. I had a couple of fights with Hugh, and I was like, “Whoa, this is not to do with us.” So that was humbling. And mildly distressing. But once I became aware of it, it was fine.
EISENBERG: I had the exact same thing. I would have these arguments that end with, “You’ve always done this,” which is how Toby accuses Rachel. You spend 12 hours a day having a certain very specific resentment. You take that home, and the circumstances overlap enough to the point where you might accuse your loving, sweet partner of the same thing.
DANES: But the appreciation for Hugh was also so heightened, because I was living in this hell. It was so painful and so terrifying, deeply destabilising. We really do need relationships. We can’t really cope in isolation. It’s just not how we function. There’s something very moving about that.
EISENBERG: As actors, you sometimes get to run these social experiments, playing a character that might overlap with you enough to give you a sense of what you would be like in these circumstances. This was a great example, because I’m quite similar to Toby.
DANES: It’s a real privilege to be able to explore those particularly daunting, intimidating, scary zones but in the land of make-believe. So, relatively safely.
Did you perform the thought experiment of what life would be like if you were suddenly single?
DANES: Very, very rarely. I don’t know. Doesn’t seem good.
EISENBERG: I was just thinking about it because in terms of the show, he’s dating again. And he’s completely untethered. It didn’t feel tantalising in any way — it felt exhausting and unsatisfying. I didn’t experience singleness in the modern era, where you’d be using technology to meet people. It increases both the options and paranoia.
DANES: I would find that particularly intimidating. And unnerving. I don’t think I would do that very well.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alexis Soloski
Photographs by: Thea Traff
©2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
An original character made a surprise return, but who didn't make it out alive?