Fleishman Is in Trouble

During a January 2023 interview with Tonya Mosley on the National Public Radio program Fresh Air, Taffy Brodesser-Akner confirmed that many of the main cast members were chosen at least partly because they were actors who had been well-known as teens and who were now middle-aged: "It was so intentional. It was--you know, there was this idea that these actors were too young to play these roles. I mean, Jesse Eisenberg, when we started talking about the adaptation, was only 36 years old. Luckily--and I mean that facetiously--the pandemic came along, and by the time. . . . [filming started, he was] 38--so we were able to rationalize that. But we had these choices. Did we want to cast people who were older who we could then look at as in a more authentic crisis of middle age? But the point of the book and the show are the beginnings of those crises. And also, this allowed us to have them play themselves in flashbacks. But most of all . . . if I don't, as a 40-year-old, yet understand what is happening to me in my life, the idea that Jesse Eisenberg--yes, from The Squid And The Whale, yes, from The Social Network--that it's happening to him, too, that it's happening to Claire Danes from My So-Called Life, that it's happening to--oh, my gosh--to Adam Brody [from The O.C.], to Lizzy Caplan [from Mean Girls], to Josh Radnor--all these people that we knew so well as very, very young people. It hits home for me so much to say, oh, my God, this is a force you cannot fight--if you're lucky. If you're lucky and you get to live, this is a force that you won't be able to fight. We're all going to get old."

Featured in Half in the Bag: 2022 Catch-up Part 2 (2023)