Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for USA Today / USA TODAY NETWORK/Sony Pictures
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Usually, when you’re the star of a film that’s widely considered to be one of if not *the best* movie of its decade, you’d want that project to be something you’re forever remembered for. Unfortunately for Academy Award nominee Jesse Eisenberg, however, that is not the case when it comes to The Social Network.
In 2010, Jesse Eisenberg starred as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in David Fincher’s The Social Network, which detailed the launch of the website while he was at Harvard and its first few years as a booming social media company.
In the 15 years since, however, Zuckerberg has become a far more complicated figure, as he’s now more commonly associated with abuses of privacy, misbegotten projects like the Metaverse, off-puttingly robotic displays of emotion, and being among a tier of wealth that most human beings find to be problematic than he is with pokes (that’s a reference for my millennials and Gen Xers out there), liking photos and status updates.
As a result, Eisenberg is now essentially ashamed of being associated with Mark Zuckerberg due to his starring Oscar nominated role in The Social Network.
“I don’t want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that.”
Actor Jesse Eisenberg accuses Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg – who he played in The Social Network – of ‘doing things that are problematic’.#R4Today pic.twitter.com/V5aqeMJaZ4
— BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) February 4, 2025
“I don’t want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that,” Eisenberg told the BBC while promoting his film A Real Pain, which recently picked up two Oscar nominations.
“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.”
Eisenberg made similar comments earlier this year when he lamented the fact that people of Zuckerberg’s inordinate and exorbitant wealth don’t just give away “half their money to a good thing.”
“So when I think about people who have a lot of power and aren’t using it to help people, I’m just mystified. Why wouldn’t you just give away half your money to a good thing? And why are you taking off protections for marginalized people on your website? To me, that’s mystifying. But I’d be the same person who looks at the Rockefellers at the time, go, ‘Why the hell are you doing what you’re doing?’” Eisenberg told The Hollywood Reporter back in January.
Zuckerberg has a reported net worth of an estimated $237 billion, making him the third-richest man in the world. He’s also recently made headlines for doing away with fact-checkers at Meta and cozying up alongside the new Trump administration, as he attended inauguration with fellow oligarchs Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.