In an interview with Jesse Eisenberg on Fresh Air this week he talks about his changing view of a man he portrayed over a decade ago, Mark Zuckerberg. And, apparently, a sequel or follow-up to The Social Network may be in the works.
The Social Network was something of an Oscar darling after it came out in 2010, getting nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for star Jesse Eisenberg, and going on to win Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay (Aaron Sorkin) and Best Score (Trent Reznor — who, sidebar, got snubbed today with no nomination for the Challengers score).
This week, as Eisenberg gets a second Oscar nod, this time for his screenplay A Real Pain, he was on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. And the conversation naturally came around to The Social Network, and how Eisenberg's view of Zuckerberg, whom he portrayed as a younger man in the 2003 to 2007 era of Facebook, has changed.
He tells Gross that he saw Zuckerberg as "an outcast in the world" who created a platform where people could interact virtually because "he felt uncomfortable connecting with other people through more traditional social norms."
She asks him if he feels at all connected to Zuckerberg when he does something that makes news, especially something he's vilified for, like ending fact-checking and some forms of content moderation on Facebook.
"As an actor, your job is to kind of like really understand your character, even if your character is a villain in a movie, your job is to defend your character," Eisenberg says. "So I spent a lot of time thinking about this guy... and at the time, when I was acting in it, I thought, 'This is wonderful. I'm totally defensible. This is a guy who is ambitious because he has this great thing he is going to unleash on the world.'"
But, Eisenberg says, his views on Zuckerberg have of course changed, and he isn't so defensible anymore.
Regarding moves like the recent one to end fact-checking, or going on Joe Rogan's podcast to brag that he's making Facebook "more MAGA-friendly," Eisenberg says, "I wonder if that's really an extension of that same person, a person whose ambition sort of supercedes their caution in a way that can be pretty dangerous."
He says, of where Meta/Facebook has gone in the last decade, and who Zuck has become, "I feel a little bit sad. Like, 'Why is this the path you're taking?'... This is that same person that I spent a long time humanizing and thinking about and trying to justify his behavior."
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin mentioned last year that he is working on a script for a January 6th movie, which no doubt could get greenlit this year, which sounds like it could center on Facebook and decisions around content moderation following the 2020 election. He added that he "blames Facebook" for the January 6th debacle (though surely we have to blame Twitter and Telegram too).
E! Online took this to mean this could be a sequel to The Social Network, but it could also just be a different film in which Zuckerberg figures in as a supporting character.
When asked if he would be up for reprising his role as the older but un-wiser Zuckerberg, Eisenberg told E! in November, "Will I be in that movie? Yeah, I'll be in anything."
