It’s a Hollywood truism that every great comedian secretly longs to do serious drama. In The End of the Tour, the 35-year-old comic actor Jason Segel delivers a bighearted performance as David Foster Wallace, the closest thing contemporary American literature has to a saint. “I wanted to do something that moved me,” he says.
The film re-creates a five-day 1996 interview the bandanna-topped writer did with Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg). Conversing in Wallace’s actual words (much of the script is taken verbatim from Lipsky’s transcripts), Segel conveys the quicksilver quality of the writer’s benevolent but uneasy genius. As the two drive around, talking pop culture and the perils of success, the real question ends up being who will control the story.
In person, over coffee in L.A.’s Koreatown, Segel is charmingly low-key. He’s cut way back on social media, moved near Santa Barbara (“I was ready to live off-campus,” he jokes), and after more than fifteen movies in as many years has decided to “get off the hamster wheel” and do only work he cares about.
He especially enjoyed reading Wallace’s 1,079-page magnum opus, Infinite Jest, with friends. “That’s not an easy book,” he says, then laughs. “Every Sunday it was four grown guys talking about loneliness.”
Sittings Editor: Mark Holmes
Grooming: Jamie Taylor
Photographed at The Line Hotel, Los Angeles
Design: Gorman Studio