Jesse Eisenberg Breaks Down His Process Writing Songs For ‘The Debut,’ Fueled by His Love of “Musical Theater Cliches”

On top of writing, directing, producing and acting in his new movie The Debut, Jesse Eisenberg took on an additional unexpected role: songwriter.

For the film — which follows a shy housewife (played by Julianne Moore) cast in a community theater production who loses herself in the performance — Eisenberg wrote seven of the original songs that comprise the movie’s central show, called Nosy Neighbors; one of those tunes, “This City May Have Chewed Me Up (But It Hasn’t Spit Me Out),” is getting a best original song awards push.

At a screening on the Fox lot on Monday, Eisenberg joined composer Emile Mosseri and moderator Justin Hurwitz to break down his musical process, teasing, “My brain goes to musical theater cliches more than it goes to like sports or women — my wife! One woman, one woman.”

The star emphasized that he is not classically trained but writes music on the piano or while playing guitar, “and again, the thing I can write is musical theater music. It’s not like I also do like what you do [in composing scores]. This is the extent of my talents and I worked really hard on it, but that’s my ceiling.”

Eisenberg recalled working with Mosseri on 2022 film When You Finish Saving the World and writing a song for Finn Wolfhard’s character. “I sent it to Emile and Emile was so sweet, but he was like, ‘This is really good if he was doing musical theater music, and he’s more doing rock music,'” Eisenberg explained. “And so I was like, ‘OK, can you rewrite the music?'” Mosseri did, but Eisenberg said it made him realize “I’m not a good enough musician to then do jazz or something like more complicated…. I really like musical theater music and I like a lot of songs I’ve written. But like that’s the extent of my skillset.”

Mosseri responded by noting how Eisenberg is “very humble and very sort of downplays his musical prowess because he wrote these incredible songs,” as the filmmaker explained that with a story set in the world of the theater, “it gave me permission in a way to make things heightened, because musicals are heightened and silly and absurdist.”

That doesn’t mean he didn’t take the songwriting seriously, though, with Eisenberg explaining, “I wanted to feel like this is a real thing. So I’m making fun of the songs, but when I’m sitting there writing ‘This City May Have Chewed Me Up,’ I’m crying. Like I am feeling the city have chewed me up, Jesse, and it hasn’t spit me out, Jesse. Like it’s very personal, but I knew the context around it is going to feel silly.”

He added that he was particularly inspired by the wave of ’90s musicals that “kind of fetishized New York City,” which he was obsessed with growing up. “All the songs in the movie are like in the spirit of that weird thing, like ‘Finding a good guy in town is like a needle in a haystack,'” Eisenberg joked. “This stuff where like I don’t think any real person who’s self-actualized can relate to that feeling, but they work in the musical theater.”