Jesse Eisenberg Doesn't Want to Be 'Associated' with Mark Zuckerberg After “Social Network”: He's Doing 'Problematic' Things

Jesse Eisenberg is not interested in being associated with Mark Zuckerberg forever.

Eisenberg, 41, famously portrayed Facebook and Meta cofounder Zuckerberg, 40, in a star-making turn with 2010'sThe Social Network. During an interview with BBC Radio 4 released on Tuesday, Feb. 4, the actor and filmmaker spoke out against Zuckerberg as he promoted his Oscar-nominated movie A Real Pain.

"I haven't been following his life trajectory, partly because I don't want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that," Eisenberg said in an interview clip the BBC shared on its website. "It's not like I played a great golfer or something and now I want people to think I'm a great golfer — it's like this guy that is doing things that are problematic, taking away fact-checking and safety concerns. Making people who are already threatened in this world more threatened."

"I'm concerned just as a person who reads a newspaper," he added, after he was asked whether Meta's recent editorial decisions "concerned" him. The company recently issued sweeping and controversial changes to its content moderation protocols and community standards across Facebook and Instagram; Zuckerberg also attended Donald Trump's inauguration as U.S. president on Jan. 20, shortly before his company agreed to pay $25 million to settle Trump's 2021 lawsuit over his previous suspension from its platforms following the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots in Washington, D.C.

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"I don't think like about, 'Oh I played the guy in the movie.' It's just I'm a human being and you read these things and these people have billions upon billions of dollars, more money than any human person has ever amassed," Eisenberg noted. "What are they doing with it? Oh, they're doing it to curry favor with people who's preaching hateful [things]?"

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Zuckerberg is the world's third most wealthy person. According to Forbes, he stands only behind Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who also appeared at Trump's inauguration after making significant contributions to the the president's inaugural fund. The Meta chairman also owns a bunker in Hawaii that reportedly spans 5,000 square feet, which Zuckerberg downplayed as "a little shelter" during a December 2024 interview with CNN.

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"So to me, that's what I think of," Eisenberg added of his feelings toward Zuckerberg, more than 14 years after The Social Network released. "But I think of that not as a person who played [him] in a movie, I think of it as 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." 

While The Social Network director David Fincher and its screenwriter Aaron Sorkin have shared over the years that they've discussed options for a potential sequel, Fincher most recently described the notion as "a can of worms" in a 2023 interview.

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