Fourteen years after earning an Oscar nomination for playing Mark Zuckerberg in 2010’s The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg has very proudly shed his
Fourteen years after earning an Oscar nomination for playing Mark Zuckerberg in 2010’s The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg has very proudly shed his former character’s hoodie and fuck-you flip-flops.
But that hasn’t stopped the world from asking the actor about his most eminent role. Eisenberg has been frequently questioned about Zuckerberg while Oscar campaigning for his film A Real Pain, which earned him a best-original-screenplay nomination. During a recent appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Today, Eisenberg said that he hasn’t been following the Facebook and Meta chief’s “life trajectory, partly because I don’t want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that.”
Distance from Zuckerberg has not made Eisenberg’s heart grow fonder, either. “It’s not like I played a great golfer or something and now people think I’m a great golfer,” he continued. “It’s like this guy that’s doing things that are problematic—taking away fact-checking and safety concerns, making people who are already threatened in this world more threatened.”
In recent months, the same man whom screenwriter Aaron Sorkin depicted as an creative Harvard outcast has entered a darker chapter. In early January, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would dump fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram in favor of a “community notes” structure not dissimilar to the one used on Elon Musk’s X. After Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election—and threatened to send Zuckerberg to prison—the Facebook founder met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and Meta donated $1 million to his inaugural fund. Zuckerberg also attended Trump’s inauguration.
“I’m concerned, just as a person who reads a newspaper. I don’t think about, Oh, I played the guy in the movie and therefore…’” Eisenberg told BBC Radio 4. “It’s just, I’m a human being, and you read these things. These people have billions upon billions of dollars, more money than any human person has ever amassed. And what are they doing with it? Oh, they’re doing it to curry favor with somebody who’s preaching hateful things.”
Eisenberg, who briefly shared a stage with Zuckerberg in 2011 when the actor hosted Saturday Night Live, said that he disagrees with the billionaire “not as a person who played [him] in a movie,” but “as just somebody who is married to a woman who teaches disability justice in New York, and lives for her students are going to get a little harder this year.”
Earlier this year, Eisenberg said he once deemed Zuckerberg’s actions “totally defensible,” and noted that a performer often does so while playing a character. But with time, the actor told NPR’s Terry Gross, Zuckerberg’s whole deal has made him “a little bit sad” and forced him to ponder, “Why is this the path you’re taking?” Eisenberg added, “So I mostly just think of it that way. This is that same person that I spent a long time humanizing and thinking about and trying to justify and defend his behavior.”
A week later, Eisenberg echoed this sentiment when asked about the tech giant by The Hollywood Reporter. “When I think about people who have a lot of power and aren’t using it to help people, I’m just mystified,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you just give away half your money to a good thing?”
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