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10. The Double (2013)
A doppelganger role can be a trap for an actor: either the two roles are not sufficiently distinct, or they are too hammily different, and either way the result can look like a film school graduation project. But Jesse Eisenberg gives a stylish split-personality turn in Richard Ayoade’s adaptation of the Dostoevsky novella. He plays Simon, a nerdily shy and self-effacing computer programmer in a grim futureworld, ignored by his employers and by co-worker Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), with whom he is hopelessly in love. But then his carbon copy, James, arrives, also of course played by Eisenberg. James is a confident alpha-achiever who impresses his bosses and entrances Hannah – to Simon’s gibbering despair.
9. The Squid and the Whale (2005)
Noah Baumbach’s brutally black-comic movie, based on his own parents’ unhappy relationship, features Eisenberg as the 16-year-old Walt, an unbearably precocious and self-important young man who has inherited all of his father’s pompous mannerisms. His dad is Jeff Daniels, a failed novelist and creative writing professor who enviously fell out with his wife, Walt’s mother (Laura Linney), when her own writing career took off. As Walt leaves the world of childhood behind, this becomes a rare unsympathetic performance for Eisenberg in many ways, and the nerdy mannerisms for which he became famous look spiky, high-handed and charmless – yet the poignant vulnerability is clear enough.
8. Roger Dodger (2002)
This was the teenage Eisenberg’s feature film acting debut, in which his persona of nerdiness, inexperience and bewilderment first arrived in the cinema, along with that patina of self-awareness with which all these things seemed nonetheless to be coated. He is the high school kid Nick, appalled by his own virginity and in dire need of advice on how to make it with girls. He approaches his Lothario uncle Roger – a glorious performance from Campbell Scott – who has just been dumped by his own girlfriend, and, in a frenzy of misogynist rage, Roger takes Nick on a tour of Manhattan’s pickup joints. Eisenberg’s innocence has a charm and openness that Nick’s womaniser lacks. In some ways, he is the opposite of his character in The Squid and the Whale.
7. Adventureland (2009)
Another of the “virgin” performances with which the younger Eisenberg made his name in the indie-adjacent cinema of the 00s, and he cleverly portrays the way in which the lack of sexual experience becomes the very centre of his character’s existence. It’s a coming-of-age story about a guy called James who has gone through a prestigious undergraduate career at college; the world, supposedly, is now his oyster. But he is still a virgin. And to earn cash for grad school he has to take a job in a scuzzy amusement park, ironically or perhaps not ironically called Adventureland, which is to provide education of a different sort and where he falls for his fellow employee, played by Kristen Stewart.
6. Sasquatch Sunset (2024)
It is a film and a role that would challenge any actor: Eisenberg, in full makeup and hairy costume, plays a grunting, nonverbal sasquatch loping through the empty northern California wilderness. He is one of four apelike bigfoot figures who are perhaps the only creatures left alive after some human-made apocalypse, or perhaps we have simply been allowed to share these creatures’ habitual seclusion, their secret existence away from humans. Eisenberg is, perhaps inevitably, the beta-male sasquatch who is less demonstrative than the alpha male grunter. It is a cult performance in a cult film.
5. Café Society (2016)
It was probably Eisenberg’s destiny to work with Woody Allen at some stage – he is in Café Society and, less prominently, in To Rome With Love, from 2012. Café Society is one of Allen’s innumerable light jeux d’ésprit comedies and perhaps not too memorable, but it has a very interesting performance from Eisenberg. He plays a nervy, gauche romantic who is, of course, ventriloquising Allen in the traditional way, but we also see him grow up from boy to man. Set in the US in the 30s, he’s the kid who gets a nepo job in LA as an assistant to his movie-agent uncle and then another in a New York club run by his brother, where he becomes a white-tuxedoed Bogartian figure, nursing a broken heart.
4. Zombieland (2009)
This came out the same year as Adventureland, creating the odd illusion that it was part of some kind of franchise – but no, the two films have nothing to do with each other, although Eisenberg’s appearance in both is not dissimilar; he is, as ever, the shy nerd who is also a potential hottie. (This film was followed up 10 years later by an underpar sequel entitled Zombieland: Double Tap, in which Eisenberg reprised his role.) He plays Columbus, a gauche, brainy guy in a post-apocalyptic landscape infested by zombies. Columbus teams up with Woody Harrelson’s redneck, who is overbearing and moreover keeps ruining his chances of making it with a young woman, played by Emma Stone, who goes on the road with them. His rage with Harrelson results in one of the most entertaining outbursts of Eisenberg’s movie career, as he screams: “You are like a giant, cock-blocking robot developed in some kind of secret government lab!”
3. The Art of Self-Defense (2019)
Film-maker and Brazilian ju-jitsu specialist Riley Stearns created a dark comedy that allowed Eisenberg to explore an interesting possibility to his habitual persona: what if that nerdy, maladroit shyness led not to romcom sexual success, but violence and a general outbreak of toxic masculinity? Eisenberg is Casey, a lonely office worker who is attacked by a gang of bikers and, traumatised, enrols in a karate class. It is led by a charismatic sensei (Alessandro Nivola) whose demands on him become increasingly disturbing.
2. A Real Pain (2024)
This understated, complex, contemporary film is Eisenberg’s directorial masterpiece. He also gives an outstanding performance, all the more interesting in that it is effectively a supporting turn, ceding the spotlight most of the time to Kieran Culkin. (The Polish-set film is also a very personal movie for Eisenberg, who has now taken up Polish citizenship.) Eisenberg plays David, Culkin is his cousin, Benji; the two are on a kind of buddy-movie road trip visit to Poland to visit the childhood home of their late grandmother, who was a Holocaust survivor. Eisenberg plays – inevitably – a strait-laced, uptight figure while Culkin is the more anarchic free spirit, but without the former’s sensibility and maturity, the latter’s performance wouldn’t make sense.
Casting Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, the young computer genius at Harvard who in 2004 invented Facebook in a frenzy of sexual and social rejection, was a stroke of genius. It allowed Eisenberg to weaponise and make sense of the nerdy onscreen persona that had come so readily to him; it also showed that he was a natural performer of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s mile-a-minute dialogue. In Eisenberg’s other films, the underdog-nerd aspect was there as a kind of adorable (or perhaps disquieting) flaw, to be surmounted in the course of the narrative. Here it is the whole point. The nerdiness is the superpower; not getting it on with girls is the equivalent of lifting a car above his head. This was the sensational role which was to get Eisenberg the part of ubervillain Lex Luthor in DC films such as Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and Zack Snyder’s Justice League and the smart-alec illusionist J Daniel Atlas in the magician-heist caper Now You See Me. But none of those had anything like the quicksilver brilliance of his Zuckerberg, who is entitled and insufferable, driven and obsessive, always convinced of his intellectual superiority, never conceding any point to anyone in any argument, treating everyone to a nonstop fusillade of putdowns and zingers. Eisenberg convinced a whole generation that this was what Mark Zuckerberg was really like. It is a classic performance.
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