Eisenberg plays another smug genius in magic blockbuster ‘Now You See Me’

TORONTO – Jesse Eisenberg has grown adept at portraying characters who are simultaneously ingenious and insufferable.

He was nominated for an Academy Award for his riveting turn as brilliant but disloyal Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and his new film, “Now You See Me,” casts the curly-haired New York native as an ambitious magician whose signature mind-twisting spectacles are matched in size only by his ego.

The real trick, Eisenberg says, is making the audience like — or at least want to watch — characters so prone to smug self-regard.

“My feeling is always if you’re playing a role and you could defend your character — which I’d say is an actor’s main job — then the audience will have no choice but to feel some allegiance even if what they’re doing is terrible,” said the 29-year-old in an interview this week in Toronto.

“I think there’s another thing you can get from playing a character who’s really smart — you can get away with being really mean. The first movie I was in was called ‘Roger Dodger’ and I was 18 years old and the main actor, Campbell Scott, played this character who’s really brash and obnoxious and chauvinistic, but when people watched the movie they kind of loved him because he’s really sharp and bright.

“So, if you’re kind of clever and good at something, it gives you a lot of leeway.”

In the case of “Now You See Me,” Eisenberg plays J. Daniel Atlas, a magician whose idea of a simple card trick is beaming an image of his mark’s chosen playing card onto the side a skyscraper.

Early in the film, Atlas as well as three other skilled illusionists — a mentalist played by Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher’s escape artist and a sleight-of-hand master portrayed by Dave Franco — are brought together under mysterious circumstances and soon begin performing together in Las Vegas as the Four Horsemen. Among their highly publicized, highly illegal tricks? Draining a Parisien bank vault and raining cash on their grateful Vegas audience.

Other similarly Robin Hood-themed heists follow until the magicians attract the attention of F.B.I. agents played by Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent, who follow closely on their trail as they build toward their biggest trick yet.

In addition to the Oscar-nominated likes of Harrelson, Ruffalo and Eisenberg, the film also features turns from veteran acting heavyweights Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine. The pedigree of the cast was not lost on Eisenberg.

“I thought if I was going to do a movie like this, which is a movie that’s very stylized and with a complicated plot, this is a really great one to do because it allowed me to work with a lot of other really great actors and we all felt like the acting in this movie was being taken seriously,” he said.

“With people like Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine, it was a little bit odd because my character’s so condescending to them, that it was also a little strange to behave that way to those faces. You want to be polite and revere them and ask them questions about their life and everything but you have to condescend to them and be obnoxious. It’s kind of strange but that’s the nature of the job, is behaving to people in ways that you would never allow yourself to behave otherwise.”

Indeed, “Now You See Me” is a departure for Eisenberg, who typically tends toward dialogue-heavy, character-driven fare, rather than summer blockbusters.

“I don’t read a lot of scripts like this because I usually do small, intimate character stories … I was surprised I was actually interested in it and it was endlessly surprising and exciting in a real way,” he said. “And a lot of times these kinds of scripts are really obvious and boring and you can tell right off the bat what the trick is, but this movie was genuinely unique and interesting.”

And he was impressed by director Louis Leterrier, who had previously worked mostly on such whiz-bang action spectacles as “The Incredible Hulk,” “Clash of the Titans” and “The Transporter.”

“He directed these big action movies so you figure he probably wouldn’t focus too much on acting, but he really did,” Eisenberg said. “He loves actors, and he would give really great performance notes too. A lot of times, I’ve worked with directors who are less interested in performance and it’s awful, because you feel like you’re acting in a vacuum.”

Eisenberg recently finished performing in the off-Broadway production “The Revisionist” alongside Vanessa Redgrave — a play he actually wrote, six years ago (he had to wait for the Oscar-winning English actress to become available). Two years prior, he starred in another production he wrote himself, “Asuncion.”

It’s clear from meeting Eisenberg that he’s uncommonly intense for a young actor — he holds his questioners’ gazes while rattling off rapid-fire answers, all the while fidgeting furiously with his hands — but with a rapidly growing body of film work (he could have four movies out this calendar year), how does he find the time to juggle stage and screen, acting and writing?

“Even actors who work consistently I think wind up with a lot of downtime. It’s just the nature of the job,” he said. “It’s a little depressing in that way that you do a job and then in three months you have to find another one.

“So if you don’t have something else going on or another interest or hobby, it can be a difficult lifestyle.”

“Now You See Me” opens across Canada on Friday.