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In his nearly two decade-long career, Jesse Eisenberg has played a variety of characters with outsize dreams. But to hear him tell it, his latest role, in the financial thriller The Hummingbird Project, finds him stepping into the shoes of his biggest dreamer yet.

The project was written and directed by Quebec filmmaker Kim Nguyen (Two Lovers and a Bear, War Witch) and it revolves around two cousins, played by Eisenberg and an unrecognizable Alexander Skarsgard, who hatch a scheme to outsmart their former boss (played by Salma Hayek) to build a fibre-optic cable line from Kansas to New Jersey to transmit data a millisecond faster than their stock-market competitors on Wall Street.

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The plan, if it succeeds, will make them instant millionaires.

“Obviously, I thought it was fake,” Eisenberg says in a phone interview. “Who would imagine someone who would do something like this to try and beat the stock market by a millisecond? And then, as I looked into it, I realized not only is this real, there are so many schemes that have similar, extravagant plans to achieve the same, narrow goal of making a few people very rich.”