Jesse Eisenberg is looking to cut ties with his connection to Mark Zuckerberg.
The 41-year-old star, who got an Oscar nod for portraying the Facebook founder in The Social Network back in 2010, hinted at wanting to create some space between himself and Meta’s top boss during a chat on BBC Radio 4’s Today show.
“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 shared with Today host Emma Barnett in the clip seen below.
“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 the fact checking and safety concerns, making people who are already threatened in this world more threatened,” he went on.
“I’m concerned just as a person who reads a newspaper,” he mentioned. “I don’t think about, ‘Oh, I played the guy in the movie’ … I’m a human being and you read these things, and these people have like billions upon billions of dollars, like more money than, you know, any human person has ever amassed, and what are they doing with it?”
Eisenberg hinted that these billionaires are using their wealth to support those spreading “hateful” messages.
“But I think of that not as like a person who played [that role] in a movie,” he explained. “I think of it as just somebody who’s married to a woman who teaches disability justice in New York and lives for her students are gonna get a little harder.”
On Jan. 7, Zuckerberg, 40, revealed Meta would swap out Facebook and Instagram’s fact-checking tools for a “community notes” system similar to Elon Musk’s X, citing worries about “bias” and “censorship.”
After Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Zuckerberg shared dinner with him at Mar-a-Lago, showed up at his inauguration on Jan. 20, and threw in $1 million to his inaugural fund along with other tech giants, according to NPR.
Then on Jan. 29, Meta coughed up $25 million to settle a 2021 federal case where Trump claimed First Amendment violations after getting kicked off Meta’s platforms following the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot in 2021.
The Wall Street Journal, who broke news of the settlement, noted that Meta had initially claimed Trump’s accusations were groundless since the First Amendment only covers government censorship.
