Not every actor gets the chance to meet the real person they are playing, but when Jessie Eisenberg was filming the 2010 Facebook drama The Social Network, he was told not to meet the website’s creator Mark Zuckerberg.
“I was driving up to meet him because I was told [by producers], ‘No, we’re not going to [set up a meeting for you],'” said Eisenberg during an episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast. “I was going to just go to the office and I figured they would let me in… I just wanted to be in a room with him, just to see what the feeling is like.”
This was back when David Fincher’s drama following the birth of Facebook had just been announced, with Eisenberg set to play the tech whizz Zuckerberg himself. As a keen then-25-year-old, the actor simply made his way to Menlo Park in Northern California to sit down with Zuckerberg. However, it sounds as though the two never actually met.
“I got a call from [producer] Scott Rudin telling me: ‘Do not go there,'” Eisenberg said. “He was telling me this on behalf of Sony’s lawyers. He was telling me, ‘You can’t do that for a variety of legal reasons.'”
Despite not being able to meet the Meta boss and “do the bare minimum research” as Eisenberg puts it, the star still managed to encapsulate a young Zuckerberg as he created the hit social media platform in his college dorm back in the ’00s. So much so, that Eisenberg was nominated for an Oscar, and the film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
The accolades just keep on coming as Eisenberg’s most recent project A Real Pain, written and directed by and starring Eisenberg, has been nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. The movie follows two cousins (Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin) on a trip to Poland to visit Holocaust sites – see our A Real Pain review for more.
The Social Network is available to watch on Prime Video. For more, see our list of the best drama movies, or keep up with upcoming movies.
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