'The End of the Tour': EW preview

STARRING Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Segel

DIRECTED BY James Ponsoldt

NOT YET RATED

RELEASE DATE July 31

When James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now) approached Jason Segel to play the brilliant and notoriously moody writer David Foster Wallace, no one was more surprised than the former How I Met Your Mother actor. “There was a big part of me that thought, ‘Why me?’ ” Segel says. To prepare for the film—about an epic 1996 interview between Wallace and a Rolling Stone reporter (Jesse Eisenberg)—Segel formed a book club with guys from his local L.A.-area bookstore to get through the author’s challenging magnum opus, Infinite Jest. “It was one of the sweetest experiences I’ve ever had as a grown man with other grown men,” he says.