Jesse Eisenberg has said he was frozen out of studio movies after winning a Razzie for Zack Snyder’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.”
The Razzies — short for Golden Raspberry Awards — are a tongue-in-cheek ceremony that “honor” the supposedly worst films of the year. They are traditionally handed out the night before the Oscars.
Eisenberg, who played arch villain Lex Luther opposite Henry Cavill and Ben Affleck, was allocated a worst supporting actor Razzie for his part in the 2016 superhero flick.
Although supposedly lighthearted, the “award” damaged his acting career, Eisenberg admitted during a screen talk Sunday as part of the BFI London Film Festival, causing him to step back from acting and instead lean in to writing and directing. (Eisenberg’s latest directorial effort, “The Debut” starring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti, is closing LFF Sunday night).
“Listen, a lot of it just came from fear,” he said of his career pivot. “I couldn’t get into movie studio parts anymore because I had won a Raspberry Award from [being in the] ‘Batman’ movie … and I saw the trajectory.”
“If you’re an actor, you’re constantly panicked about ‘Am I on an upslope or a downslope?’” he explained. “Because there’s no plateau. Acting is just this unstable, awful industry where you are either on the treadmill and you’re doing okay and you’re running up or you are yesterday’s news and it’s awful. And if you’re a paranoid person like me, you see it way in advance.”
“So I was like, I’ve got to direct movies. That’s why I started writing them, just to kind of keep my career afloat, really.”
“Batman v Superman,” which opened globally with an impressive $424.1 million box office, took home four Razzies overall, including for worst screenplay, worst sequel and worst screen combo for Cavill and Affleck. Eisenberg has previously said the film’s “poor” reception damaged his career.
At the BFI talk, the actor said his takeaway from the experience was that he shouldn’t star in any more superhero films. “The industry tells you what they want from you,” Eisenberg said. “The industry did not want me to be in a superhero movie, and if you’re smart and self-aware, you learn that quickly. And you know, it’s the unsuccessful actor that goes ‘No, I want to be in more of those.’ It’s not going to happen and they don’t want you there and they wouldn’t have given you a Raspberry Award if they wanted you there. That’s an award for bad acting. And so the industry tells you what it wants and if you want a career in the arts you have to follow the things that you’re being told are liked.”
One role the industry did want to see him reprise was that of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, given Eisenberg was nominated for a best actor Oscar for playing the tech titan in 2010’s “The Social Network,” penned by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher.
Despite that, the actor has been adamant he did not want to return in the recently-released follow-up “The Social Reckoning,” which Sorkin both wrote and directed. He didn’t expand on that decision during his LFF talk, other than to say the “companion movie,” as it has been dubbed, “is quite different.”
He was more open about working with Kieran Culkin in Eisenberg’s sophomore directorial effort “A Real Pain,” which was released in 2024. The movie scored Eisenberg a nod for best screenplay and Culkin a best supporting actor win at last year’s Oscars, but the film could have turned out very differently.
“We didn’t know if Kieran was ever going to show up to Poland,” Eisenberg revealed. “Emma Stone is producing the movie. She personally took him on the plane to Poland [where it was shooting] because we didn’t know if he was going to show up. She sent me a video of him going through customs, saying ‘We are here!’ and then he still was late.”
And Culkin, who’d recently come off HBO’s mega-hit “Succession,” was adamant he wanted Eisenberg to use a similar “spontaneous” shooting style, which had not been part of the plan. “We’re like, what’s best for the movie?” the actor/director recalled as he tried to work out what to do. “And I guess what’s best for the movie is probably following this live wire around because that’s the engine of the movie anyway. If he had a small part, you’d be like, ‘We just have to tell this guy to shut up,’ you know? But he’s the lead… So it was a real learning curve.”