Jesse Eisenberg: Privacy settings engaged

You won’t find Jesse Eisenberg, formidable as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, on Facebook. It’s a different kind of attention he craves

Jesse Eisenberg is eager to deflate expectations. This, he assures me, will be a mediocre interview. His answers shall be trite and generic. He doesn’t have a clear thought process at this stage in the day. He’ll ramble. It’d be better were I to lie on the couch and have him quiz me instead (he sees two therapists a week, so he’s pretty proficient in probing). Words rattle out of him: self-deprecating scattershot from a salmon-shirted manboy.

Muting the buzz is no easy task. After a decade as the go-to guy for directors in need of a sweetly inept alter ego – Roger Dodger, The Squid and the Whale, Adventureland – he’s suddenly, at 27, playing a rather more formidable real-life character: Mark Zuckerberg, in David Fincher’s The Social Network, a fictionalised take on Facebook’s birth and subsequent internal fallout. It’s topped the US box office for the past fortnight, been hailed as the film that defines the decade, and is a shoo-in for Oscar nods. His face is everywhere, in alarming closeup.

So, managing expectations is tough. Plus, Eisenberg has a reputation for being as bright in the flesh as he seems on screen. Unlike, say, Michael Cera – his weedier, creepier doppelganger – he’s one of those rare actors who can project real intelligence (not just fluency or intensity). Cute casting, then: few could pull off Zuckerberg without making him seem frighteningly isolated or unreachably geeky. Eisenberg makes it look a cinch.

There’s an emotional connection, he thinks. “Mark doesn’t feel happy interacting in person,” says Eisenberg, “and so he creates a comfort zone, an environment where you can have relationships which are the ideal version. At the start of the movie, he has trouble with a two-way dialogue, first when he’s talking with his girlfriend [she dumps him], then when he writes his blog [he trashes her]. And then he creates Facebook.”

Eisenberg’s equivalent was acting. He turned to plays aged nine after struggling to fit in at school, and suffering what he’s described as “terrible separation anxiety” (Eisenberg’s Woody Allenish neurosis is no mere patter – it is absolutely for real). “When playing a role, I would feel more comfortable, as you’re given a prescribed way of behaving. So, both Facebook and theatre provide contrived settings that provide the illusion of social interaction.”

It’s a ferociously unvain performance – feral-faced, stiff round the torso, left hand forever lodged in hoodie pocket; a movement born from his discovery that Zuckerberg is an expert fencer. His Zuckerberg is bitter, ruthless, obsessive – another of the focused sociopaths that Fincher specialises in, rather than one of the lovable stutterers from Eisenberg’s CV.

Eisenberg leaps to Zuckerberg’s defence, nonetheless. “I really view him as an artist. And if you view it in that way, a lot of what he does is not only defensible but necessary. As an actor, if I show up late somewhere or I say something that’s eccentric, it’s totally acceptable – not only that, it’s lauded in some perverse way. Because Mark is a businessman, we don’t give him the same leeway.”

He sips some orange juice, bristles with the injustice. “But if you substitute Facebook for the Mona Lisa, then everything in the movie is seen in a different light. His kicking off his friend because he has to protect his painting: I think we would all understand that.”

Eisenberg brilliantly captures the creative fizz Zuckerberg feels while designing and coding Facemash, the Hot or Not-style site that’s the precursor to Facebook; flexing his fingers, playing the keyboard like a Steinway. “It’s this very exciting feeling that you’ve got something that’s yours and is original and is some way contributing. Mark creates Facemash in a flurry of inspiration. The end result is really painful for many people, but the creation is really remarkable.”

Eisenberg isn’t on Facebook himself – far too self-loathing, he says, plus further celebritisation of his personal life is the opposite of what he wants – but he’s open-minded towards those who are, and defensive towards the charges of destroying privacy levelled against Zuckerberg.

“It’s just a technology; it can be used either benevolently or harmfully. When cellphones came out, my girlfriend refused to get one for five years, because she thought it would turn her into somebody who couldn’t connect with other people – and, of course, she got a cellphone. And I’m sure after Facebook it will be the little cameras that we have implanted into the palms of our hands and we’ll be debating whether we should get them, and then we’ll all get them. And then we’ll have pants with holes cut out for our genitals and at first people won’t want to have those pants and then of course we’ll all have those pants. Society will decide after the technology is created what we will and won’t accept.

“I already have way too much attention paid to me. I wouldn’t want to be totally invisible because it would be hypocritical to say I want no attention at all. I assume that’s 90% of why I act; I didn’t get enough attention as a child. That’s why all actors act – they want more attention.” He smiles and his eyes flit nervily round the room.

Eisenberg was born in New Jersey in 1983 to Barry, a sociology professor, and Amy, a professional clown. He found a happy niche at a performing arts college, where he was studying when he won the lead in Roger Dodger, in which he plays Campbell Scott’s callow nephew, coached in the art of the pick-up. Then, a pause, until The Squid and the Whale, since when he’s worked steadily, in between completing a degree in democracy and cultural pluralism (“It’s meaningless. You have a choice of 17 degrees and then you take the same exact classes as the guy who took art history.”)

The common thread through most of Eisenberg’s performances is that he plays a young man intellectually seduced by someone older who turns out to be less impressive than expected. In The Social Network, this psychological framework is repeated: Zuckerberg is a sucker for Sean Parker, the Napster founder played by Justin Timberlake, who eventually becomes a liability.

Eisenberg nods, and enjoys the reductiveness of the reading. “Yeah, I play that revelation really well. It’s like: wait a second, you’re not everything you’re cracked up to be? The world is not black and white? Wait a second, I think I just grew up! Let me check.” He peeks beneath his shirt to check on the progress of any chest hair. “Nope, still a kid.”

There’s something remarkably youthful about Eisenberg. He’s less personally assured than he seems on screen; the opposite to what you’d expect. For the evidence suggests Eisenberg is both erudite and enterprising. At 22, he launched oneupme.com, an internet parlour game in which users must provide punchlines for a gag set-up (“She was like a Laundromat … kept stealing my socks”). At 26, he wrote a couple of pieces for literary mag McSweeneys – a list of Marxist/socialist jokes, another of manageable tongue-twisters. He’s also knocked off a novel and a musical, and has lived with his girlfriend, Anna, 33, for four years.

He acknowledges the confusion. “I’ve never had tastes of people my own age. All of my friends when I was 15 were in their 40s. I’m not actually mature, just very self-conscious around people my own age because I feel like I’m supposed to act the same way they act and I don’t know how.”

He stops and swallows. “Well, OK, no – the truth is I like to infantilise myself because then I don’t have to be an adult. If I’m always around people who are older than me then I can act like a child, which is how I feel most comfortable because I miss my mum.” I laugh – but he’s not kidding. “I get really homesick. If I’m with someone my age and I act like a child it seems very strange behaviour. If I’m with someone younger, it makes me very uncomfortable. Because I have to take care of them; if there’s a fire I’m supposed to save them. I want to be saved.”

Still, Eisenberg will, at some point, get older. Does he fear a sell-by date on his coming-of-age schtick? He looks cheery. “No. That feeling – of deification and then demystification – is timeless. The joy of acting for me is to be able to experience emotions in a safe environment. You can’t scream and cry in the street because everybody will look. If you do it on a movie set, you get applauded. And that’s one of the great emotions we can experience. Everyone can put somebody on a pedestal and then realise the pedestal is of your own making.”

He’s right. A good point, by a fine actor. Curious, then – sad, even – that Eisenberg should try so hard to dislodge himself from a pedestal he belongs on. – Guardian.