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Jesse Eisenberg may have nailed his portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, but the actor is drawing the line there when it comes to any additional “association” with the controversial Facebook co-founder and Meta Platforms CEO.
“I haven’t been, like, following his life trajectory, partly because I don’t want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that,” he said of Zuckerberg on BBC Radio 4’s Today on Tuesday.
Eisenberg, whose latest film A Real Pain is up for two Oscars, portrayed a young Zuckerberg in 2010’s Oscar-winning The Social Network. During his interview on Tuesday, the multi-hyphenate insisted that “it’s not like [he] played a great golfer” who people now mistake him for, but rather he played someone like Zuckerberg, who he said is “doing things that are problematic.”
“Taking away fact-checking and safety concerns, making people who are already threatened in this world more threatened,” he specified, referring to Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta is “replacing fact-checkers with community notes” on Facebook and Instagram.
When asked if he was “concerned by those actions,” Eisenberg confirmed he was, noting that he’s “concerned just as like a person who reads a newspaper” and not because of his link to Zuckerberg.
“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 like billions upon billions of dollars. Like more money than any human person has ever amassed and like, what are they doing with it?” he asked. “They’re doing it to curry favor with somebody who’s preaching hateful things. So to me, that’s what I think of.”
He continued, “But I think of that not as like a person who played in a movie. I think of it as just somebody who’s 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.”
As noted by Deadline, others have criticized Zuckerberg’s recent implementations as appeasing the new administration. This includes Jimmy Kimmel, who called out Zuckerberg’s “suspiciously Trump-friendly announcement” as “flushing whatever dignity he had down Trump’s golden toilet” on the Jan. 7 episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!
According to CNBC, Zuckerberg, who donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, dished out praise to the new administration during Meta’s Jan. 29 earnings call, saying, in part, that he is “optimistic about the progress and innovation that this can unlock.” In settling a lawsuit filed by Trump in 2021, Meta agreed to pay $25 million, perThe Wall Street Journal.
The Social Network writer Aaron Sorkin teased in April 2024 that he is planning on crafting a sequel to his film, saying on The Town podcast at the time that he “blame[s] Facebook for Jan. 6.”
