With leading roles in such films as Zombieland, Holy Rollers, and Advertureland, as well as his lauded breakout in The Squid and the Whale, the not-quite-30-year-old Jesse Eisenberg is already a veteran film and stage actor. Asked what drew him to the part of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, he replies: “I thought I knew the way in. This character appears emotionally detached and often enigmatic. I thought the way in was this feeling of loneliness and also, occasionally, superiority. I think he feels like he’s wasting time in a lot of the rooms he’s in and he’s 10 steps ahead of the people he’s with. I think he’s just really frustrated. It’s two seemingly opposing feelings: One is feeling superior, and the other one is desperately trying to connect and not knowing how. And I thought I kind of understood that dichotomy. I can certainly relate to it.”
As for working with director David Fincher, Eisenberg confirmed reports that the opening scene was filmed 99 times, yet he found it to be a valuable process. “The movie is framed from three different perspectives. And while we’re all the protagonists of our own version of the story, we’re the antagonists of the other characters’ versions. So while we were filming, David Fincher would come up to each actor and say, ‘You know, your character is really right in this scene.’ Then he’d go up to the next actor and say, ‘You know, your character is really right in this scene.’ And so we all felt that our character was doing the right thing and was justified. [Fincher created] an environment where every character felt like they were doing the right thing, even though there’s a great dispute at the heart of the movie.”
Armie Hammer is having his breakthrough moment in The Social Network playing not only one but two roles. Cast as the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, Hammer is making the jump to the big screen following roles on the small screen in TV’s Gossip Girl and Reaper. Though the “twins” are identical in appearance, they differ in personality, especially in terms of their decision to pursue a lawsuit against Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. When asked whether screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s complex dialogue and pacing posed extra challenges to a young actor, Hammer insisted that Sorkin’s script made things “100 percent easier. Normally, in other scripts the lines don’t inform each other. So you have to act more to make the lines seem like they work. But in this it was so flawlessly written and it flowed so well. There was almost a sense of musicality to it. Like if you missed a word in one of the lines, it would be like hitting the wrong note while playing a piano piece, and you know it and you’d feel it.”
This article appears in October 1 • 2010.
