Jesse Eisenberg: “Every Time We Get a Nomination, It Makes Me Realize How Much I Was Losing Before”
Click here to read the interview or watch our back-up version below.
Photo by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images. After taking the top drama trophy at the Golden Globes on Sunday, The Social Network feels like the freight train to dodge come Oscar time. And here’s why: the triumvirate that is David Fincher’s directing, Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, and its young cast’s impressive performances. Chief among those performers is Jesse Eisenberg, whose embodiment of Mark Zuckerberg felt so spot-on, you half expect to catch him tooling around Palo Alto in fuck-you flip-flops and diluting his best friend’s stock options. Eisenberg has long been a rising star, jumping from the New York theater scene to breakout roles in Rodger, Dodgerand The Squid and the Whale, to more recent successes such as Adventureland andZombieland. And as the Academy tallies ballots, Eisenberg may soon find himself Oscar-nominated. Little Gold Men caught up with Eisenberg between his gazillion awards appearances—highlights from our chat:
John Lopez: So, I lost track long ago of how many critics-awards nominations you guys have for this movie.
Jesse Eisenberg: Yeah, I know—I haven’t heard of some of these cities.
Is it a little daunting, a massive ego boost, or both?
I think it’s my nature to—every time I hear about an award or a nomination, it makes me realize how much I must’ve been losing before, because I was not aware that every major city had these critics’ awards. So while I’m so honored and it’s wonderful to be acknowledged and to be associated with this wonderful movie, you know, it’s a little overwhelming, too. I realize how many more cities there are that I haven’t been called about.
You mean Billings, Montana’s Online Critic Society passed you over?
Yeah, or the Bergen County Regional Actor Doing a Movie Related to Technology Award.
That’s the one that keeps you up at night because you didn’t get it.
Yeah. It’s kind of a strange feeling. When you’re acting in a movie, you never consider the reception of it. It’s impossible to predict how something will be received. Even if you think it’s the greatest thing in the world, other people might not like it. Or agree with it. So it’s been an overwhelming few weeks of trying to put this very strange experience in a more digestible place.
Since it’s becoming a cultural touchstone, do you find people identifying you with Mark Zuckerberg?
No, I mean, I’m not really much of a technology expert. I really don’t know too much about Facebook beyond—I was only on Facebook for a few days, during the rehearsal process of the movie.
What I real like about your performance is that Zuckerberg is a real person but you didn’t play a carbon copy of Mark.
Ha, yeah, I can’t do impressions well. But it’s not really the reason I played it the way I did. There are a few reasons. One was practical. Mark doesn’t speak that quickly, but we had a 165-page script for a two-hour movie, so there would be the need to speak more quickly than the real person does. And I was really encouraged by David Fincher to focus on what it’s like to be that powerful at that age—to have to squeeze a friend out of a company. So those psychological questions were far more interesting to me than figuring out what would be exactly accurate.
Having said that, I did try to immerse myself in Zuckerberg as much as possible, because it provided a bit of a safe haven for me. Some people take their iPods to movie sets and listen to Radiohead so that they can get into the spirit of the movie; I just listened to interviews with Mark. I tried to stand like him and took lessons in fencing because he was a fencer. He stands in this kind of sturdy posture because of his fencing background, I imagine. So I tried to kind of immerse myself in him, but it was more just to make myself feel prepared.
So you basically do all that prep, and then just throw it away when the camera rolls and trust your instinct?
Exactly. Acting is kind of difficult to intellectualize—it’s a far more visceral experience. It’s really hard to be able to think about and then employ these kind of esoteric notions of this person’s backstory and try to weave it in somehow. It’s just kind of impossible.
I have to ask you about the infamous 99 takes—how does that feel as an actor?
[Laughs.] Oh, no, it’s not bad at all. The frustrating part of being a movie actor is waiting in your trailer to do two takes of a scene you’ve prepared for two months. This was the opposite. We were on the set for two nights straight, and we just acted for two nights. That’s exhilarating. I’m able to find little moments by Take 98 that I never would have been able to find had I not been able to do that many takes. The goal in theater if you’re in a play for two months is, by month two, [to] find new things to make it more interesting for yourself—find things that you would never have thought if you only had one month to do it. Movies kind of are the opposite. You just start discovering things, and then they change the camera setup and you’re no longer on camera.
I know you guys shot at John Hopkins, but I have to say, as far as my experience, all these little details made it really feel like Harvard—he even had amazing replications of the houses’ Web pages.
Wow, really? Yeah, that’s a good indication of the way he works on every moment. I mean, so much so that the computer coding that was written in the movie was the version that they would have used in that year, as opposed to the version that’s currently being used. He’s that way with everything. He’s that way with the eyebrow of the actor to the way the light hits the back wall, to how much liquid is in each glass.
That must be comforting as an actor, to know that’s there.
Yeah. You feel like you can experiment and do things you might be scared to do on a movie where you felt there was less oversight. Especially with my character, who has a unique personality and may come off in various, potentially strange ways—emotionally aloof or impenetrable—or even worse, which is something I run the risk of, being, like, maybe funny. It’s not something I try to do, but I find myself sometimes trying to be funny where it’s not appropriate. With somebody like Dave Fincher, you feel like you can try all that stuff, and the only things that will make it into the final product will be things that will be right for the character and right for the story.
It also helps have Aaron Sorkin write great one-liners like “Have I adequately answered your condescending and pretentious question?”
It’s so great—these words are strung together with such impact that you don’t want to screw it up. The other side of wonderful dialogue is you don’t want to be the one to screw it up, because the person who’s established the foundation of the scene has done so incredibly well. When you put the finishing touches on that, as an actor, you don’t want to be the one to make it ugly.
Well, it seems like a role you were born to play. When you read the script, did you think, I’ve got this. I can be Mark Zuckerberg; I am Mark Zuckerberg.
Well, I didn’t know how the character was supposed to come across. I had an idea what I wanted to do—but when I auditioned for the movie, I’d never seen any kind of video or anything about Mark Zuckerberg; I had an idea based on what I read in Aaron’s wonderful script. What this person might sound like, how this person might interact with other people and absorb other people, and how he would appear. I’ve played a character that I felt was a bit similar in a play a few years ago, and I really liked that kind of role, but oftentimes you feel that way, and the people who are making the decisions don’t feel that way about you. Those things are not necessarily always in accordance.
But do you go back and look at old performances and go, “Man, I nailed that.”
Well, the experience of being an actor is different from the experience of watching an actor. When you’re acting, you’re trying to make this very contrived setting feel as real as possible. Oftentimes, that reality looks uninteresting or boring, so I don’t really watch the movies I’ve been in, because the feeling I have while doing it almost never the matches the feeling I get from watching it. Things are funny or effective because they’re edited at a certain pace or because of the way all the dominos are stacked up next to each other, rather than the individual domino that you’re bringing to the table. So, I don’t really
If that was an effort to dodge the question, it’s an eloquent one and great way to end things. And I have to talk to Andrew in five minutes, unless he’s busy being Spiderman.
It takes him usually more than five minutes to do that.
Ha, yes. Any messages to pass along?
Yeah, can you tell him that he owes me 20 bucks?
Absolutely.
