In 2010, the Academy-Award-nominated actor played the Facebook founder in David Fincher’s The Social Network, based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires.
The Social Network was a huge success, earning eight Academy Award nominations and winning three. Aaron Sorkin’s wordy award-winning screenplay made us believe that the Meta CEO was like his character on the silver screen.
On top of that, Jesse’s unforgettable delivery virtually made him synonymous with the tech billionaire.
But, the writer/director and star of A Real Pain said in a new interview he doesn’t “want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that.”
On BBC Radio 4‘s “Today,” Jesse said he’s no longer following Mark’s “life trajectory” and doesn’t want to be associated with the billionaire because of his “problematic” decisions.
“It’s not like I played a great golfer or something, and now people think I’m a great golfer,” Jesse 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.”
For context, on Jan. 7, Mark announced that Meta would replace its fact-checking systems on Instagram and Facebook with “community notes,” similar to Elon Musk’s X. Mark claimed that the original fact-checking system had led to “too many mistakes and too much censorship” and was “too politically biased.”
Following Donald Trump’s win in the 2024 presidential election, Mark donated $1 million to his inaugural fund alongside other tech giants, including Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Companies such as Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Uber, and Toyota also donated $1 million.
“I’m concerned just as a person who reads a newspaper,” Jesse 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.”
But this isn’t just about Jesse putting distance between himself and the film version of Mark. He said he thinks this way “not as a person who played [him] in a movie” but as “as just 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.”‘
Listen to the interview here.