Sometimes, moviegoers have to separate the art from the artist. Other times, they need to understand that Jesse Eisenberg would never dilute Andrew Garfield’s shares.
At the time when David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s dramatized film retelling of the founding of Facebook (formerly The Facebook) premiered in 2010, the American public had a mixed opinion of the company’s enigmatic and socially awkward CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Fast forward 15 years, and very few of us here in America see any more mystery in the tech billionaire CEO’s motives as he cozies up to the second Trump Administration and strips away what few guard rails Meta still had in place to prevent hate speech and politically charged misinformation from spiraling out of control on their many social media platforms.
Meanwhile, The Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg currently eyes an Academy Award win for Best Original Screenplay following the critical success of his most recent film A Real Pain, and he worries that the backlash toward his sexist college web project Facematch may still stain his public image among people who have a hard time separating fiction from reality. In a recent talk with BBC Radio 4’s Today, Eisenberg said of his biggest role as Zuckerberg in The Social Network, “I don’t want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that.”
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Well, he probably should have thought about that before he planted that story in The Crimson.
During the interview, Eisenberg admitted that he hasn’t been deliberately following Zuckerberg’s “life trajectory” since playing the billionaire in The Social Network, but it’s hard not to pick up a few things when you read the news.
“It’s not like I played a great golfer or something and now people think I’m a great golfer,” Eisenberg said of his biggest role, then referencing the sweeping changes Zuckerberg made to Meta’s policies following the re-election of President Donald Trump. “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.”
But while Eisenberg has no personal interest in Zuckerberg’s career post-2010, as an American, it’s hard for him not to notice what the former Harvard upstart has been up to. “I’m concerned just as a person who reads a newspaper,” Eisenberg said of Zuckerberg’s recent politically charged moves. “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.”
To be perfectly clear, Eisenberg reiterated that this isn’t his opinion as the actor who played Zuckerberg, but simply “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.”
While Eisenberg’s message on Zuckerberg’s recent and world-changing decisions is more measured, empathetic and human than anything the tech giant has ever even thought, he should also probably count his blessings that he even has a wife after what he wrote about poor Rooney Mara in his LiveJournal.
