Ten years ago, actor Jesse Eisenberg was interviewed by Romina Puga. This has become a legendary interview of sorts and clips are still circulating demonizing the actor and victimizing the interviewer. Neither side is represented well. She claims he was mocking and demeaning. He claims he thought it was all a joke. Should be easy enough to determine who is telling the truth since it is on video but even with that it is not that simple.

First of all, the fact this has taken ten years for it to come to my attention speaks volumes of how arbitrary it all is. I think I might have watched one or two movies of Eisenberg’s and I don’t even know who Puga is. So really, I have no horse in the race. I thought it was just an interesting case of he said/she said with no clear indicator of the truth.

To start with, this came to my attention via one of those Facebook fillers. The type of posts that have an appetizing title and you click on it and lose about 30 minutes of scrolling trying to actually get to the gist. You know the type, they typically stop loading right before the end and kick you out. It’s annoying and I tend to shy away from clicking. But sometimes I have 30 minutes of my life I need to waste and I click.

This particular post was a variant of celebrities who are not nice. Eisenberg was listed but when I tried to read what happened the site kicked me out. Instead of trying to reread that whole thing I just googled it and sure enough, Jesse Eisenberg Interview was amongst the top choice.

I clicked it and watched the video. It wasn’t the actual video but clips of it edited together. Along with written text to emphasize and draw attention to what he was doing. It pointed me down the tunnel of opinion it wanted me to go. No, he was not portrayed as a nice guy.

You can watch it for yourself here.

Okay, not really too interested in the interview but more interested in his response, I went back to Google and looked at other relevant links. Including this one from 2020 in which he responds to the reaction from the interview.

Now, this just got interesting, didn’t it? Here we have an interview that we can watch for ourselves. But we still have two versions of what we can see for ourselves. Who was the victim? Who was the bully?

After watching it for myself I have come to the conclusion: I have no idea. I can see both points and both sides. I can see how Eisenberg could be an awkward conversationalist. He has the type of personality I would not want to talk to unless I had to. Some people do not have and do not desire to cultivate the charm skill. I can kind of see him being one of those.

I can see Puga not being adept enough to handle a difficult interview. Nothing against her it’s just there are some things that are out of reach of all of our skill sets. This could have been one of them. To suppose going in an actor would be an “easy interview” would be naive. Not all are comfortable in selling their work (which is themselves really so I get it).

In the end, I can see both sides of the story and I don’t really care enough to keep digging. I think it is more of a cautionary tale for both the interviewer and interviewee. Even if someone is filming what is being said there are those that will control what and how it is shown.

Now if you will excuse me, I have 30 minutes to kill so I am going to find another useless story on Facebook to read 85% of.