Jesse Eisenberg Loved Playing Lex Luthor but Says It Hurt His Career, and He Blames Himself

Academy Award-nominee Jesse Eisenberg has been in a ton of great movies and series over the years including The Social Network, Adventureland, American Ultra, the Zombieland and Now You See Me franchises, Fleishman Is in Trouble, and more.

And just like any other actor, there have been projects that have been much less well-received. One movie on that latter list is the DC sequel Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

While sitting down to talk about his career on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax and Monica, Eisenberg explained that when that movie came out, he was “two feet out the door” when it came to Hollywood.

He felt that the business was going to “spit me out tomorrow,” and he was planning on focusing more on his work as a playwright.

Then, his mother-in-law got sick, so he and his wife spent most of their time in her hometown of Bloomington, Indiana to help her out and he was “around none of it” (meaning the movie business) for long enough that the news of the BVS reception just didn’t touch him for quite some time.

“I was in this Batman movie and the Batman movie was so poorly received, and I was so poorly received. I've never said this before and it's kind of embarrassing to admit, but I genuinely think it actually hurt my career in a real way, because I was poorly received in something so public.

“I've been in poorly received things that just don't see the light of day, and for the most part no one knows, but this was so public and I don't read notices or reviews or movie press or anything so I was unaware of how poorly it was received.”

Once he figured out how the film, and his performance was received, he felt that the negativity hurt his career, seeing as how the scale and reach of the film was much bigger than his typical project. He went on to say:

“I loved my role and I loved the movie, doing it and everything, so I feel just, myself to blame. I'm not like ‘They did me wrong.’ I'm like ‘Oh, I guess I did something wrong there’… It was depressing but I'm depressed all the time in some ways, [I] just like ‘Oh, yeah of course I had this great opportunity, of course it didn't go well,’ just pessimism.”

Eisenberg went on to recover, and hopefully he has more to be proud of these days. The actor will release Now You See Me 3 in 2025, and he is in pre-production on an Untitled musical/comedy that he wrote and will direct, which will star Paul Giamatti and Julianne Moore.