Jesse Eisenberg has revealed he’s still haunted by the “dumb thing” he did before hosting Saturday Night Live.
The A Real Pain actor-director, 41, hosted the long-running sketch comedy show in 2011.
During an appearance on Today with Jenna & Friends on Monday, Eisenberg was asked about his memories of appearing on the show and joked: “I think they said it was the best episode they ever did!”
He continued: “No, I only have bad memories because I did such a dumb thing. I wrote this movie... My dream when I was 17 was to write for SNL. I made a packet and everything and I got an agent. And then, when I got asked to host, which was 10 years later, I assumed I could write all the sketches, because I didn’t know how it works. It turns out, they have writers.”
Eisenberg explained that he realized later he’d made a faux pas: “I didn’t realize — I’m an idiot — and I was also just wanting to write. I’ve wanted to write my whole life. So I spent the week slipping scripts to different actors. I didn’t realize that was not the way you do that.”
Asked by host Jenna Bush Hager if any of his skits made the air, Eisenberg confirmed they hadn’t and said he blamed himself. “It was so unbelievably inappropriate and offensive of me that, no,” he said.
Bush Hager’s guest host Amy Poehler, who was a cast member on SNL from 2001 to 2008, suggested that Eisenberg had put too much effort in. “You kind of worked too hard,” she said. “Which is not, you know, if you’re going to go one way, it’s better to go that way than the other way.”
“Not according to the people who wrote the show!” Eisenberg joked. “They wished I went the other way.”
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today program, Eisenberg explained that he hadn’t been “following [Zuckerberg’s] life trajectory, partly because I don’t want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that.
“It’s not like I played a great golfer, and now people think I’m a great golfer. It’s, like, this guy who is doing things that are problematic, taking away fact-checking, and [the] safety concerns. Making people who are already threatened in the world more threatened.”
