‘Social Network’ Star Hates Being ‘Associated’ With Zuckerberg

Actor and director Jesse Eisenberg said he wants to distance himself from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, after famously portraying the Facebook founder in the 2010 biographical drama The Social Network.

During an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Today Tuesday, Eisenberg disclosed he hasn’t been keeping up with Zuckerberg’s “life trajectory, partly because I don’t want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that.”

“It’s not like I played a great golfer or something and now people think I’m a great golfer,” the actor, who received an Oscar nomination for the role, continued. “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.”

Zuckerberg has spent the past few months trying to curry favor with President Donald Trump. Along with donating $1 million to his inaugural fund through Meta, Zuckerberg also attended Trump’s inauguration ceremony in January.

Earlier that month, the billionaire also announced a new fact-checking system for Facebook and Instagram similar to the “community notes” seen on Elon Musk’s X. He claimed that Meta’s initial model made “too many mistakes and too much censorship” and was “too politically biased.”

“I’m concerned just as a person who reads a newspaper,” Eisenberg continued. “I don’t think about, ‘Oh, I played the guy in the movie and therefore…’ 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. And what are they doing with it? Oh, they’re doing it to curry favor with somebody who’s preaching hateful things.”

The actor also added that he holds this perspective “not as a person who played [him] in a movie” but 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.”