Jesse Eisenberg may have played Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg on the big screen in 2010's The Social Network, but any link beyond that isn't something Eisenberg is keen on. "I haven't been following [Zuckerberg's] life trajectory, partly because I don't want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that," the 41-year-old actor and film director told the BBC's Radio 4 on Tuesday, per CNN. "It's like this guy that's doing things that are problematic, taking away fact-checking," Eisenberg added, referring to Meta's recent decision to no longer use independent fact-checkers and to ease up on previous rules around hate speech and abuse. "Making people who are already threatened in this world more threatened."
Eisenberg told the BBC he was "concerned" over the fact that people like Zuckerberg "have billions upon billions of dollars, like more money than any human person has ever amassed, and what are they doing with it? ... They're doing it to curry favor with somebody who's preaching hate"—an apparent reference to President Trump. Eisenberg noted his concern came not through the lens of being the actor who played Zuckerberg, but "just as a person who reads a newspaper," and as the spouse of a woman "who teaches disability justice" (his wife, Anna Strout, works for the Voices of a People's History nonprofit, per Town & Country).
Eisenberg—who most recently wrote and directed A Real Pain, which earned co-star Kieran Culkin an Oscar acting nod and Eisenberg a nomination for original screenplay—hasn't had much face-to-face Zuckerberg interaction. Although the two briefly appeared together on SNL in 2011, Eisenberg said on a podcast last month that although he'd been set to meet with the Facebook founder before The Social Network came out, he got a call from the film's producers on his way to the meeting telling him to steer clear of Zuck "for a variety of legal reasons," per CNN. (More Jesse Eisenberg stories.)
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