Jesse Eisenberg

Jesse Eisenberg is an American actor, playwright, and filmmaker, born on October 5, 1983, in Queens, New York. Raised in East Brunswick, New Jersey, he made his Broadway debut at sixteen in a 1999 revival of The Rainmaker. His early screen work included the television series Get Real and the films Roger Dodger, The Squid and the Whale, and Adventureland. In The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach's 2005 drama about a divorcing Brooklyn family, Eisenberg played Walt Berkman, a teenager trying to imitate his literary father. He later portrayed recent graduate James Brennan in Greg Mottola's Adventureland, set at a Pennsylvania amusement park during the summer of 1987. His most widely recognized performance came as Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg in David Fincher's The Social Network (2010), written by Aaron Sorkin from Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires. The film dramatizes Facebook's creation at Harvard and the disputes involving Eduardo Saverin and the Winklevoss twins. Eisenberg received Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Screen Actors Guild nominations for best actor for the role. He played opposite Andrew Garfield as Saverin, while Armie Hammer portrayed Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Eisenberg's clipped delivery and combative scenes with Garfield, particularly the final confrontation over Saverin's shares, became central to the film's portrait of Zuckerberg. His later roles have ranged across comedy, drama, animation, and franchise filmmaking. In Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland (2009), he played Columbus, a survivor who labels people by cities and relies on an elaborate list of zombie-avoidance rules; he returned for Zombieland: Double Tap in 2019. He voiced Blu, a domesticated macaw transported from Minnesota to Rio de Janeiro, in the animated films Rio and Rio 2. In Now You See Me and its 2016 sequel, he portrayed J. Daniel Atlas, a magician in the Four Horsemen. He also played Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Justice League (2017). As a writer, Eisenberg has published fiction and written plays including Asuncion, The Revisionist, and The Spoils. The Revisionist premiered off Broadway in 2013, featured Vanessa Redgrave and concerned an American visiting a Polish cousin. His feature as writer and director, When You Finish Saving the World, premiered at Sundance in 2022. Adapted from his Audible Original, it stars Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard as a mother and son. In 2024, he wrote, directed, and starred in A Real Pain, about cousins touring Poland after their grandmother's death.