Aug. 06--"I never look at entertainment stuff online, just out of emotional self-preservation," Jason Segel says. "I stopped a while ago, as an experiment, and I very quickly realized that I felt better. Emotionally, I felt better. When you focus on what's actually happening in your own life, you realize things are largely fine." Tracking the latest political gaffes or, a little closer to home, the latest casting controversies -- why waste the time?
Segel, 35, is a familiar and comfortable comic presence to millions, best known for "Freaks and Geeks" and "How I Met Your Mother" on TV, "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and "The Muppets" and many others in the movies. At the moment, over coffee and hard-boiled eggs at the Waldorf-Astoria in downtown Chicago, he's three cities into a press tour: San Diego, Seattle, Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., upstate New York, the Twin Cities and Los Angeles, where he lives, in the east side Los Feliz neighborhood.
The actor is promoting a movie about a writer, a real one, who spent several close days with a Rolling Stone journalist while on a book tour flogging the thing that took the writer from almost-famous to famous. In "The End of the Tour," Segel portrays "Infinite Jest" author David Foster Wallace. "Social Network" Oscar nominee Jesse Eisenberg plays David Lipsky, whose Rolling Stone profile of Wallace never ran.
Two years after Wallace's 2008 suicide Lipsky published "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace," drawn from the interview tapes. These have been adapted by screenwriter Donald Margulies for the screenplay. A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright ("Dinner with Friends") and longtime Yale University writing instructor, Margulies has a lengthy list of students who went on to become active players in the film industry. One of them, director James Ponsoldt, had "The Spectacular Now" and "Smashed" on his resume when Margulies sent him the script. He liked it.
"The End of the Tour" premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival. For months before the premiere, skepticism ran rampant about whether Segel, who made his name on some pretty broad comedies, was even halfway right for the role of Wallace.
To some the entire project felt squishy. Wallace's family, backed by his longtime publisher Little, Brown and Company, issued a statement last year saying they "neither endorse nor support" any film "loosely based on transcripts from an interview David consented to eighteen years ago for a magazine article about the publication of his novel, ' Infinite Jest.' That article was never published and David would never have agreed that those saved transcripts could later be repurposed as the basis of a movie."
Segel naturally was aware of the bad blood. Wallace's family, he says quietly, "made the question of what I could 'get away with' irrelevant. It was very important to honor the love those people have for him. There's a core group of people he means the world to. I thought about that quite a bit."
Eisenberg, reached by phone, says: "Many people were surprised by Jason's casting. I wasn't. He's a writer, and he's a funny person, and in a movie like this, those are real assets -- not that it's explicitly funny, but a lot of the talk is philosophical and abstract, and finding someone with an acute sense of irony was important.
"I think Jason's wonderful; I always did. I see how acting works. I know how people who become known for certain things can actually do other things."
"The End of the Tour" has more than two characters, but most of its key scenes place Segel and Eisenberg in confined spaces together. The actors didn't rehearse, for scheduling and other reasons. "But that ended up working for the movie," Segel says. "Wallace and Lipsky weren't friends, or roommates. When we meet in the movie, when he shows up at my house, that was the first time we acted together. I think you can tell we're sniffing each other out." Segel describes the situation as "acting with/slash/against somebody else."
"These guys knew what their intentions were in every scene, and what secrets they had," says director Ponsoldt by phone. "My goal is to capture moments of surprise and revelation on camera. These actors are craftsmen, they make strong choices, and Jason was amazing right out of the gate with 'Freaks and Geeks.'" As Wallace and Lipsky travel together, mutual wariness, enjoyment, fatigue and, to some degree, envy guides the conversations. Ponsoldt likens Segel to Tom Hanks who, in the director's words, "was doing beautiful work long before he was recognized for more serious work."
Certain things were discovered and revised on set. There's a scene when Wallace, having met up with his Twin Cities friends on the book tour, begins to see Lipsky as a romantic rival. "That scene," Segel notes, "was written much more aggressively, where I pushed him up against the refrigerator. Much more confrontational." What's now in the film is subtler, with Wallace reminding/scolding/warning Lipsky to "be a good guy."
The encounter's real-life inspiration cannot be found in Lipsky's book. Screenwriter Margulies drew from more recent discussions he had with Lipsky, and he went his own way with it. "I'm a dramatist; that's what I do," Margulies says by phone. "A scrupulous transcription is not dramatic."
The screenwriter, who proudly claims 26 unproduced screenplays to his credit including a five-hour HBO adaptation of the Jeffrey Eugenides novel "Middlesex," credits "two verbally dexterous, extraordinarily well-cast actors" with making the conversations sound, well, conversational. "From the get-go," Margulies adds, "this was a subjective portrait of this man who spent five days with David Foster Wallace. It's an experience as seen through the eyes of Lipsky."
Segel acknowledges that he "could've stalled forever" regarding the homework that led to the vocal, physical, emotional and interpretive decisions making up his performance. The man who wrote so dazzlingly, in "Infinite Jest" and elsewhere, on addiction, love, competitive tennis and the American media-industrial complex is not subjected to an objective portrait in "The End of the Tour." Segel's playing Margulies' idea of Wallace, and the screenplay's distillation of Lipsky.
"I don't think there's any version of 'too much research' for a part like this," Segel says. "I had four months and that felt rushed. I decided early on that the most honest way to approach it was to study only what had happened to Wallace up to that time. Indicating anything past then, in Wallace's future, would've been false."
Sitting beside his uneaten eggs (how many eggs go uneaten by an actor on a multi-city press tour?), Segel reflects: "We're told from a very young age that pleasure, entertainment, achievement -- these things will leave you feeling satisfied. But Wallace isn't. What happens when things go exactly the way you'd hoped they'd go, yet you feel exactly the same as before? That's what the movie is about to me. Lipsky has ambition that Wallace recognizes. Wallace, on the other end, is saying: Be careful, I think I just discovered there's no 'there.' The 'there' just keeps moving."
Segel admits he "worked through a lot of fear and questions about whether I was capable of doing the part. I know this much. I know Jesse and I worked as hard as we could, and when James said 'That's a wrap' it was the first time in my life I actually felt I had done the best I could, and that it was good enough. The stuff that was in my control, I did it and was satisfied with it.
"I've worked nonstop for a long time," says the actor who embarked on his first press tour, for "Freaks and Geeks," 17 years ago. "I think I finally figured it out. I finally learned that time when you're not working isn't just 'waiting.' Life is equally important -- making friends with life."
"The End of the Tour" opens Friday.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
mjphillips@tribpub.com
