At one point in his career, actor Jesse Eisenberg played a fictionalized version of Mark Zuckerberg for the 2010 movie The Social Network. He even received an Oscar nomination for the role. Now, approaching two decades later, Eisenberg doesn’t like to think of himself “as associated” with Mark Zuckerberg.
Eisenberg spilled the details while speaking on BBC Radio 4’s “Today.” According to Eisenberg, he doesn’t follow the “life trajectory” of Zuckerberg, “partly because I don’t want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that.”
He further emphasized that what Zuckerberg is doing is “problematic,” and explains that it has to do with his decisions to remove aspects like “fact-checking” from Facebook:
“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.”
Jesse Eisenberg also separated himself from Mark Zuckerberg by emphasizing just how much money Zuckerberg has and what he chooses to do with it such as supporting Donald Trump:
“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…’ It’s just, I’m a human being and you read these things and 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 also emphasized that there are his beliefs “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.”
Things certainly have changed in the near fifteen years since The Social Network was released, and as such, it’s interesting to see how Eisenberg might feel about these aspects today. Stay tuned to ScreenGeek for any additional updates regarding Eisenberg’s career as we have them. The actor was most recently nominated for a “Best Original Screenplay” Oscar for the film A Real Pain.