Jesse Eisenberg said he was shut out of studio films after receiving a Razzie for his role in Zack Snyder’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.”
The Razzies, or Golden Raspberry Awards, are a light‑hearted event that “honors” the year’s worst films, typically presented the evening before the Oscars.
Eisenberg, who portrayed arch‑villain Lex Luthor opposite Henry Cavill and Ben Affleck, received a Worst Supporting Actor Razzie for his performance in the 2016 superhero film.
Though meant as a joke, the award harmed his acting career, Eisenberg said during a Sunday screen talk at the BFI London Film Festival, prompting him to step away from acting and focus on writing and directing. (His most recent directorial project, “The Debut,” featuring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti, is set to close the festival on Sunday night.)
“Listen, much of it came from fear,” he said about his career shift. “I couldn’t land studio roles after winning a Raspberry Award for the ‘Batman’ film, and I could see where things were headed.”
“If you’re an actor, you’re always wondering whether you’re on an upswing or a downswing,” he explained. “There’s no plateau—acting is an unstable, grueling business where you’re either grinding away and making progress or you’ve become yesterday’s news, which feels terrible. As someone who tends to worry, I can see the shift coming long before it happens.”
“So I thought, I need to direct movies. That’s why I began writing them—to keep my career going.”
“Batman v Superman” opened worldwide with an impressive $424.1 million at the box office and went on to win four Razzies, including Worst Screenplay, Worst Sequel, and Worst Screen Combination for Cavill and Affleck. Eisenberg has previously said the film’s poor reception hurt his career.
At the BFI talk, Eisenberg said his lesson was to avoid future superhero roles. “The industry tells you what it wants,” he said. “It made clear it didn’t want me in a superhero movie, and a perceptive actor picks up on that fast. As he put it, the unsuccessful actor insists on doing more of those films, but the industry won’t have it—and it wouldn’t have handed him a Razzie if it did. The Razzie signals poor performance, and if you want to stay in the arts, you must heed what the industry signals as valuable.”
One role the industry did want him to revisit was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, for which Eisenberg earned an Oscar‑nomination for best actor in 2010’s “The Social Network,” written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher.
Despite that, he has been firm that he does not want to return for the recently released follow‑up, “The Social Reckoning,” which Sorkin wrote and directed. He didn’t elaborate on that choice during his LFF talk, aside from calling the “companion film” quite different.
He was more forthcoming about collaborating with Kieran Culkin on his second directorial effort, “A Real Pain,” released in 2024. The film earned Eisenberg a best‑screenplay nomination and Culkin a best‑supporting‑actor Oscar, yet it could have taken a very different shape.
“We weren’t sure Kieran would even make it to Poland,” Eisenberg revealed. “Emma Stone is producing the film; she personally flew him to Poland for the shoot because we weren’t certain he’d arrive. She sent me a video of him clearing customs, shouting ‘We’re here!’—yet he was still late.”
Culkin, fresh from HBO’s hit “Succession,” insisted on a spontaneous shooting approach that wasn’t in the original plan. “We kept asking what’s best for the movie,” the actor/director recalled while figuring it out. “I suppose the answer is to follow this live wire, since he’s the film’s driving force. If he had a minor role, we might just tell him to quiet down, but as the lead, it became a genuine learning curve.”
