Jesse Eisenberg Cast In Richard Ayoade’s The Double

Hipster icon, commercial success, and critics’ teachers’ pet Jesse Eisenberg appears to be conquering the world with his film choices, ranging from The Social Network to Rio to the about-to-release comedy 30 Minutes or Less. Today the young actor can add another credit to his ever growing resume as he will star in Richard Ayoade‘s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyefsky‘s The Double.

Ayoade has just recently taken the directorial route with Submarine, a coming-of-age film from 2008, which received a lot of critical praise. Before that, he was mostly known for his role as Maurice Moss in the British sitcom The IT Crowd.

In The Double, Eisenberg will play a bureaucrat who starts losing his mind when a man with his exact same appearance stars working at his office. Vulture, who reported Eisenberg’s casting, is calling it “Fight Club for bureaucrats.” The book itself is of course Russian, but the film will take place in modern-day America.

While I’m not completely familiar with Ayoade’s work, I am a huge fan of Community, of which he has directed a few episodes, and of Jesse Eisenberg, whose career choices seem to be without flaws. I can’t wait to see him opposite of Aziz Ansari in 30 Minutes or Less and I was pleasantly surprised by how much Eisenberg’s voice added to the kids’ film Rio. He’s a fantastic actor and I’m eager to see what he can do with The Double under director Richard Ayoade.