Jesse Eisenberg Gave Finn Wolfhard Advice on Managing Panic Attacks on Set

Jesse Eisenberg is sharing the advice he received as a young star that he is now passing along to others.

In a new interview, the 39-year-old actor looked back at the advice he received from Adventureland director Greg Mottola about managing anxiety on set.

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“‘You’re doing a job that’s very emotionally exposing and very publicly horrible. I would be surprised if you didn’t have that, and please never worry,’” Jesse recalled Greg telling him, via GQ. “‘This is a two-dimensional medium and we’re not seeing what’s inside your head.’ It just changed my life because I was able to take my anxieties more seriously and realize that it’s okay to feel that stuff in a professional setting.”

Before they started working on his directorial debut When You Finish Saving the World, Jesse passed along some advice to star Finn Wolfhard when he started feeling “really anxious and depressed.”

“[Eisenberg] was like, ‘Have you met me? I’m the most nervous guy in the entire world,’” Finn, 20, recalled. “I was so uptight and nervous about it, because I just was like, ‘This is the first movie [that I’m doing] as an adult.’”

Finn said that he started having routine panic attacks when he was about 15 while working on Stranger Things. At the time, he decided “not talk about anything, because I just was having this crazy whirlwind career, so there was no time, or at least we didn’t feel [there was] at the time.”

“Everyone was like, ‘Look at him, he’s fine. He’s having the best time,’” Finn said. “But in reality, I was probably also developing and things were happening in my brain and anxieties were forming and things that I didn’t realize that I had to bury because of how I had to feel at work.”

He added, “When things feel really overwhelming and big, it can feel even more big to kid actors who just feel like it all can be gone in an instant.”

Finn also recalled how Stranger Things co-stars Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin helped him through a panic attack.

“They were like, ‘Dude, we’re the only people that know what it’s really like,’” Finn said. “Gaten and Caleb, we’re for life, bonded for life.”

In another recent interview, Finn explained why he doesn’t think Stranger Things should go beyond five seasons.