Ideally, Jesse Eisenberg says, he would have at least met Mark Zuckerberg before portraying the Facebook co-founder in the 2010 film The Social Network. So the actor concocted a plan.
Eisenberg looked back on the David Fincher drama, which is now celebrating its 15th anniversary, as part of a wide-ranging discussion on the latest episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast with host Scott Feinberg.
After being cast as the tech titan, Eisenberg wanted the opportunity to meet with Zuckerberg in person before filming began, but the movie’s producers hadn’t set anything up. So the then-25-year-old actor decided to simply drive to Menlo Park in Northern California to walk straight into the Facebook offices and ask for a sit-down with Zuckerberg.
“I was driving up to meet him because I was told [by producers], ‘No, we’re not going to [set up a meeting for you],’” Eisenberg recalled. “So I was literally in my car driving up. I was going to just go to the office and I figured they would let me in. [The film] was announced that I was in it. I just wanted to be in a room with him, just to see what the feeling is like. It just seemed like the bare minimum of research. How could you act in a movie [when] there’s a living person over there?”
Then The Social Network’s power producer called Eisenberg’s cell phone.
“I got a call from Scott Rudin telling me: ‘Do not go there,’” Eisenberg said. “He was telling me this on behalf of Sony’s lawyers. He was telling me, ‘You can’t do that for a variety of legal reasons.’”
During the podcast, Feinberg asked Eisenberg about Zuckerberg’s recent controversial behavior, which includes abandoning professional fact-checkers on Facebook in favor of a community notes system like X, amid an apparent rightward shift in the wake of Donald Trump securing his second term in office. Zuckerberg was among a group of tech titans who sat behind Trump last week at his second inauguration.
“I married a really brilliant woman,” he said. “My wife works in the real world. She created Disability Justice, an awareness program, and she teaches in public schools in New York. She tries to help people. 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 has recently earned critical raves for his writing, directing and acting in A Real Pain, a film about two cousins who travel to Poland together to visit Holocaust sites. Eisenberg’s original screenplay for the film received an Oscar nomination earlier this month, 14 years after he was nominated for and Oscar his portrayal of Zuckerberg in The Social Network.
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