The line between success and failure can get blurred under a deluge of criticism, especially when it starts affecting your real life. That appears to be what Jesse Eisenberg has been secretly dealing with for nearly a decade. Deadline reports that in a recent chat on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, Eisenberg revealed that he feels his role as Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice might’ve harmed his career.
Batman v Superman amassed a gargantuan $874 million at the global box office, as well as earning an ignominious 29 percent critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Mark Kermode of The Observer writing that he left the movie “wondering if it was all just a bad dream.” According to the Oscar-nominated actor, the storm of bad press surrounding the film pierced his typically impenetrable shield when it started affecting his career.
“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.”
Eisenberg later appeared as the megalomaniacal Superman nemesis in the similarly financially successful Justice League film which was also similarly maligned by critics, inspiring Sara Stewart of the New York Post to describe it as “a pointless flail of expensive (yet, somehow, cheap-looking) CGI that no amount of tacked-on quips, or even [Wonder Woman actor Gal] Gadot’s luminescent star power, can rescue.” To his credit, Eisenberg wasn’t the issue with either Batman v Superman or Justice League, especially since the latter was so poorly structured that fans cried for (and surprisingly received) a reworked version of it by the film’s originally attached director, Zac Snyder.
I can only imagine how frustrating it must’ve been for him. He had to shave his head to sport Luthor’s signature bald look, which he was afraid to do, only for one of the lasting impressions of his performance in the film among viewers to be that the hair he sported earlier in Batman v Superman looked like a strange wig.
All’s well that ends well, though. Eisenberg has recently received a Best Actor nomination at January’s Golden Globes for his role in the film A Real Pain, 14 years after his only other nod, which was for his role as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2010’s The Social Network. Plus, life could be worse. He could’ve made Black Adam.