Three Things I Like About Jesse Eisenberg

headshot of Jesse Eisenberg

1. He is a good actor who tends to pick projects I enjoy watching.

2. He fosters cats. If you can't watch the whole interview, the summary is Conan O'Brien asking him if his "life has changed considerably since Social Network came out," to which Eisenberg replies, "Well, I've got more cats," and then goes on to explain: "Well, you know, I'm a foster parent for cats, and, um, um, the more movies I do, the more guilty I feel, and, um, the more cats I feel the need to get to alleviate the guilt from doing the movies, and then if a movie is, god forbid, popular, then I have to get even more cats… I have two now BUT I'm on kind of a list where they can deliver them to the house, so it's two at the moment. … And, if you haven't been to New York, the apartments are tiny, and so, to be a foster parent for cats is basically to have, like, you know, tenants coming in and out, like, if you live in a house, it'd be like the equivalent of having, like, a lot of people coming and staying over, uh, because my apartment's so small. So, I have a lot of cats, a lot of cat food, a lot of litter, and, um, nothing else in the apartment. … My life is basically just, you know, feeding and cleaning cats. And then I get to be the Sexiest Geek Alive."

3. He does not like rape jokes:
LMD: When a comedy [like 30 Minutes or Less, Eisenberg's new film] is this raunchy, is there such a thing as going too far?

JE: There is stuff in this movie that I'm uncomfortable with. I don't like to use the "R" word, for example. Rape, for example. I'm very uncomfortable with that word, personally, because I do work with domestic violence organizations and I'm very aware of the alarming statistics of women who are abused. So I'm very uncomfortable with that. I'm not uncomfortable with the sexual jokes. Sometimes I think they're less funny than others, I don't care about that, because it doesn't harm anybody. I'm uncomfortable with saying "rape," I don't like saying that, I never say it in my life. If somebody says it, I cringe. I don't like it when people make jokes about that word.
Eisenberg is, in addition to being an actor, a writer. It would be swell if he started writing some of his own material, sans rape jokes, because I suspect there's some significant bit of crossover between survivors and people who appreciate self-deprecating, slightly neurotic, highly intelligent actors who dig cats.

[H/T to @fakeplasticstar.]

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