Two for one Jesse Eisenbergs in "The Double."
Sometimes you find yourself getting cast in an “adaptation” of a board game. Sometimes you find yourself getting cast in an adaptation of a novella by one of the masters of fiction. If you’re Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska, you’ve got the latter. Deadline reports that the pair will star in an adaptation of “The Double,” a novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Richard Ayoade will direct; he co-wrote the script with Avi Korine.
I read “The Double” during my very enjoyable Dostoevsky phase in college. It’s about a mousy government clerk who suddenly begins to see someone who looks exactly like him, but has the opposite personality–he’s self-assured, a go-getter, outgoing. The original guy is convinced that this double is trying to steal his life and becomes more and more paranoid. It’s one of Dostoevsky’s great paranoia stories, like “Notes from the Underground.”
Eisenberg is in Woody Allen’s next, “Nero Fiddled,” and is filming “Now You See Me.” Wasikowska has “Stoker” and “Wettest County,” once known more sensibly as “The Wettest County in the World,” coming out this year.
