The Verge: Justin Bartha

For years, Justin Bartha's been a dependable supporting player in comedies (The Hangover), tentpoles (National Treasure) and even misfires (Gigli), but his days of second fiddle may be coming to an end. In the new drama Holy Rollers, Bartha still plays support to Jesse Eisenberg, but through his role as the debauched Hasid who lures Eisenberg into a life of drug running, Bartha gives the movie its jittery intrigue. Meanwhile, the 31-year-old actor has the lead in Stanley Tucci's Broadway musical Lend Me a Tenor, and though he was gone for most of the first Hangover, he's due to have an expanded role in the second.

Last week, Bartha spoke to Movieline about the perils of indie filmmaking, Eisenberg's habit of self-deprecating, and the job he'd take on the next Hangover if director Todd Phillips asked him.

You seemed to be having a lot of fun in this film. Is it more satisfying for you to play the bad boy?

Oh yeah, it is. It's a lot of fun and a lot of hard work, but it's always good to branch off and do different things. That was the challenge of the role: I think he's incredibly insecure, and the confidence is put on. That's one of the character traits that start to unravel over the course of the script; it's his arc, this loss of power and social standing within the drug running family he's created. After Jesse's character steps up and I've gotten sick from doing too much of my product, you can see his insecurities that Jesse's going to take his place.

When you say it was a lot of hard work, are you talking about the performance, or the fact that this was such a low-budget indie?

It was a little bit of both. This was a passion project for everyone involved, and we shot in 18 days in the winter of New York on a very small budget. You've got a limited amount of time and you've got to stay focused, but the elements, at times, are a bit unbearable. We just had to stay that course, because Jesse and I had been working on developing it for years with the producer and director.

So what happened during that development? How did the project change?

The impetus for this project started with one of the producers who saw a clip of the true story about these kids dealing Ecstasy. This was years ago, and then Jesse and myself got a script that was more focused on the drug-dealing and thriller elements, and we knew that with the amount of money we were gonna raise and the amount of time we'd have to shoot it, that would be pretty impossible. Over a couple years, we really kind of developed it into a character-driven piece that we wanted to make in the vein of a 1970s character drama like Mean Streets or Midnight Cowboy, albeit not as wonderful as those movies. Once we had an idea of what we were going for, we were able to spend a long time researching, because we'd spent so much time raising money. We really researched the Hasidic community and planned out every beat we were going to go through.

Jesse actually recommended you for this role, right?

Yeah, I've known him for years, and we've been very close friends. We sat next to each other on a plane many years ago, and we both lived near each other in New York, and just like any friendship, it developed over the years. I think we both have a mutual admiration for each other's work.

Whenever we talk to Jesse, he always says he's not that confident he's doing a good job, that he's certain he'll be fired and replaced. Do you see that from him on set?

Once he gets on set, he's very confident, he knows what he's doing. He's just a rare, wonderful actor. We all have our insecurities, and being an actor is self-deprecating to begin with. We could probably talk for hours about actors' insecurities -- every single actor I've ever met has them, whether they talk to you about them or not.

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