Yahoo Movies 'Jesse Eisenberg always played Mark Zuckerberg as a movie villain'
A Real Pain actor-director Jesse Eisenberg doesn't want to be associated with his character from The Social Network, but his was never a flattering take.
This week, Jesse Eisenberg explained very clearly that he no longer wants to be associated with Mark Zuckerberg. Eisenberg announced himself as a Hollywood star way back in 2010 when he earned an Oscar nomination for portraying the Facebook founder in David Fincher's exquisite biopic The Social Network. In fact, it was only the dominance of The King's Speech — somewhat baffling in hindsight — that kept Eisenberg from winning the big prize.
“I don’t want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that," Eisenberg told BBC Radio 4 while promoting his new movie A Real Pain. "It’s not like I played a great golfer, and now people think I’m a great golfer. It’s, like, this guy who is doing things that are problematic, taking away fact-checking, and [the] safety concerns. Making people who are already threatened in the world more threatened."
It sounds as if Eisenberg has some regrets about the role given the level of controversial that the real Zuckerberg has become. He was given pride of place alongside fellow tech bros Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos at Donald Trump's inauguration in January, just after he announced that Facebook would abandon its fact-checking process and recommend more political content to users.
However, the shades of that problematic side to come were already there in Eisenberg's performance. The Social Network hit cinemas at a time when Facebook was still growing and was on the verge of becoming the world's most important website. This was before numerous controversies, from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to Facebook-spread disinformation being implicated in the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
Read more: Jesse Eisenberg says playing this ‘poorly received’ character genuinely hurt his career (The Independent, 3 min read)
Despite Zuckerberg being the main character of The Social Network, he's never even close to being a sympathetic character. In the rapid-fire opening sequence — one of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's greatest ever achievements — Zuckerberg gets himself dumped by his perfectly lovely girlfriend Erica because of his elitism, arrogance, and all-consuming desire to be the smartest person in the room. He's pathetic.
That sense of Zuckerberg as a pathetic figure comes back around in the final scene, in which we see him sending a friend request to Erica and repeatedly refreshing the page to see if she has responded. As the film puts it, many years and billions of dollars haven't changed Zuckerberg at all. He's still that pathetic guy in the bar who can't handle being rejected by a woman he wrongly perceives himself to be "above".
Whether the real Zuckerberg can be called a villain is perhaps worthy of debate, but there's no question that the film version of the character falls into that category. He's sleazy, sarcastic, and willing to screw anybody over — including his best pal Eduardo, played with typical soul by Andrew Garfield. The fact that the movie's Zuckerberg professes not to care about money only makes his actions seem more villainous and shady in motive. He seems motivated by spite and jealousy above anything else.
All of this shines through from Eisenberg's performance, which never loses sight of how dangerous it is for a man this petty to have the kind of power he was afforded by Facebook's success. By the time the credits roll, his awkwardness and youthful arrogance have given way to a quiet and rather chilling determination to grow Facebook at all costs.
Read more: Jesse Eisenberg did not meet Mark Zuckerberg before The Social Network for this reason (CNN, 2 min read)
Interestingly, Eisenberg has changed his tune on his relationship with Zuckerberg in the last few years. As recently as 2019, Eisenberg said he was willing to play Zuckerberg again if Sorkin wrote a script for a sequel to The Social Network. It's a mark of how much has changed in the five years since then that the star now doesn't want to touch Zuckerberg with a 10-foot pole. Frankly, it's understandable.
Eisenberg, though, said everything he needed to say about Zuckerberg in The Social Network. Even in a film that is ostensibly about the birth of Zuckerberg's world-changing invention, the final image is of a lonely man in a dark room waiting for a woman to talk to him. No possible sequel could say more about the man behind Facebook than that.
The Social Network is streaming now in the UK via Prime Video.
