See Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace in First Trailer for New Biopic
A year after Instagram paparazzi gave us the first look at Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace, here’s the trailer for The End of the Tour, a forthcoming film about the beloved author in the months following the publication of Infinite Jest. Watch it below.
The trailer appears faithful to Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, David Lipsky’s account of a five-day stretch of Wallace’s Infinite Jest book tour, which was published in 2010 and on which The End of the Tour is based. (Jesse Eisenberg plays Lipsky.) That book had its moments, but was more useful as a document of Lipsky’s own anxieties than as a portrait of Wallace, who committed suicide two years before its publication.
Physical resemblance aside, Segel aptly channels Wallace, who in interviews was always low-key and charming, seeming both impressed with and a little embarrassed by his own mind. The trailer nails this dichotomy in a slightly hokey exchange between the two leads: “I got a real serious fear of being a certain way—I treasure my regular guy-ness,” says Wallace, to which Lipsky replies, “You don’t crack open a thousand-page book because you heard the author was a regular guy. You do it because he’s brilliant.”
Wallace’s estate renounced The End of the Tour last year, saying in a statement given through attorneys that his family members “have no connection with, and neither endorse nor support” the film.
