This Trainwreck Clip Of Jesse Eisenberg Being A Joyful Asshole Will Make And/Or Ruin Your Day
"You're like the Carrot Top of interviewers," Eisenberg says to his poor, stressed-out journalist.
Jesse Eisenberg is probably not an asshole.
Sure, the guy often plays one in movies, and he did author a book called Bream Gives Me Hiccups. But there are lots of interviews where he is very nice and friendly — when Junkee interviewed him, for instance, many years ago, he expressly wanted us to tell our readers that he wasn’t a jerk.
That said, his reputation as a snark-filled roustabout won’t exactly be helped by this clip of the man giving a young journalist a hard time.
The clip was recorded way back in 2013, as promotion for the film Now You See Me, and caused some splash back then. But it’s gone viral again on Twitter, mostly on account of the fact that it’s fantastic and wonderful, in a mean-spirited kind of way.
Things start bad, with journalist Romina Puga asking Eisenberg to say his name into the camera, and then referring to his co-star Morgan Freeman as “Freeman”.
But from there, the tension quickly escalates. Puga tries to do a magic trick that Eisenberg shuts down; he calls her the ‘Carrot Top’ of interviewers, which she immediately and visibly seems upset by; and then she’s so flustered that she lies while he’s doing a magic trick, ruining it.
“I don’t need to be amazed, I already know how it’s done,” Eisenberg quips at a visibly upset Puga.
Basically, the whole thing is a total trainwreck, the kind of compellingly horrible incident we can’t turn away from. It’ll either make you hate Jesse Eisenberg, or feel something like begrudging respect for him.
Watch the clip that went viral here:
Thinking about how this exact level of asshole is my type pic.twitter.com/dYz0EDUCZ0
— m (@jane1snakehole) February 12, 2020
And then, if you can stomach it, watch the entire interview here, which includes the fabled ‘Freeman’ back and forth: