Despite his critically acclaimed performance as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg doesn’t think of himself ‘as associated’ with him.
The Now You See Me actor, 41, played the Facebook and Meta founder in the 2010 biographical drama – but Jesse has stressed that he wants nothing to do with the billionaire businessman, citing Facebook’s recent policy changes as one of his reasons.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4, Jesse revealed that he hasn’t been keeping up with Mark’s life ‘partly because I don’t want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that.’
He added: ‘It’s not like I played a great golfer or something and now people think I’m a great golfer. 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.’
The 2010 movie tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, which became a massive social media empire. Andrew Garfield also stars as Eduardo Saverin, who is known for being a co-founder of Facebook with Zuckerberg.
Meta announced last month that it’ll no longer use independent fact checkers on Facebook and Instagram, and will be replaced with community notes usually found on X.
This will give users the ability to challenge the accuracy of posts.
Mark was also one of many media moguls who attended Donald Trump’s inauguration last month.
Jesse further explained that he holds these 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.’
Jesse, who his currently promoting his Oscar-nominated comedy A Real Pain, previously opened up on his stint in DC’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice ‘hurt his career.’
He played the evil mogul in the 2016 film alongside Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill, and despite an astonishing $873million at the box office – the movie didn’t sit well with critics.
Speaking about the movie’s reception during an appearance on the Armchair Expert podcast, he shared: ‘I was in this Batman movie and the Batman movie was so poorly received, and I was so poorly received.
‘I’ve never said this before, and it’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but I genuinely think it actually hurt my career in a real way, because I was poorly received in something so public.
‘I’ve been in poorly received things that just don’t see the light of day, and for the most part, no one knows.
‘But this was so public, and I don’t read notices or reviews or movie press or anything, so I was unaware of how poorly it was received.’
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