4 min readJESSE EISENBERG HAS never seemed like the type to hold back on what he’s really thinking. The 42-year-old actor, writer, and director is still probably best known for his quick-tongued turn as Mark Zuckerberg in David Fincher’s The Social Network, but if he’s got any signature across his work in front or behind the camera, it’s a penchant for both his characters and his camera to feel totally, completely honest to what he’s experiencing at any given moment.
That signature couldn’t have seemed more true on Tuesday at Men’s Health’s offices in Midtown Manhattan, when Eisenberg was interviewed by Men’s and Women’s Health Editorial Director Richard Dorment for the second annual Men’s Health Lab event. Eisenberg was on stage discussing his experience donating one of his kidneys to a stranger last year, and, eventually, the conversation arrived at the subject of health trends in the pursuit of longevity.
These are the kinds of trends that it seems like everyone is getting into right now. So, let’s get down to brass tacks, right? Is Eisenberg a cold plunge guy? “I don’t do anything like that,” he says. What about other things, like VO2 Max workouts? “I think it’s ridiculous.”
It’s a fair question, then, to wonder: Eisenberg has been open throughout his career (and throughout the whole Men’s Health Lab panel on Tuesday) about his own experiences with anxiety. So, now, as a person with just one kidney, is this just something else to be anxious about? Or is there some merit in thinking about ways to stick around a little longer, if we can do something about it?
Eisenberg has clearly given this some thought, and so he went off for more than a minute, uninterrupted:
I’ve got to be honest with you, and forgive me if this goes against what you publish. But to me, a lot of these things, when I read them, just seem like narcissism masquerading as health. It’s this feeling that I should live forever… To me, it’s just insane. How could you read the news? How could you see that people are starving in other places, and decide that you need to go in a cold thing, and then a hot thing, so that your whatever is something different. To me, I read this stuff with just absolute mystification. I can’t understand that this is the thing that we all look at and say that there’s some kind of… this is the problem—it’s discussed almost in an ethical way. Like, This is a good thing we should be doing. No. It’s a thing you’re doing for yourself. And I think if we recategorize it as that, we wouldn’t be so worried about doing it. We’ve conflated it with some ethical way of living, which I think is just a total mistake, and kind of just takes us further and further into a kind of selfishness as a culture. And, so, I don’t like that stuff. I don’t like when I see people at the gym maximizing everything. It’s like, what are you in this for? I understand if it’s, like, a hobby, and it’s fun for you—then it’s fine. It’s like playing a board game, or whatever. But to conflate it with some kind of ethical way of living just seems to me so misguided and incorrect.
As he finished, applause spattered through the event’s attendees. “This is why I shouldn’t drink coffee or talk about…” the actor added with a smile.
Dorment raised a strong counterpoint, suggesting that there are two different ideas at play here: the idea of simply extending the length of your life, and the idea of extending your own usefulness and the extent to which you can give back to the world.
Eisenberg, again, tapped into the energy he clearly has within when channeling characters like his particularly twitchy take on Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice or an anxious dad on a fraught road trip in last year’s Academy Award-nominated A Real Pain.
But he still doesn’t quite buy it:
My question would be, like, OK, you’re doing all that stuff at the gym. How is it useful? Explain to me how what you’re doing helps the world or helps anything besides your own vanity and your own longevity? And if you had a good answer, I would say fantastic. But my sense is that 99% of the people doing that stuff do not have a good answer.
It is for vanity, Dorment joked. It’s for Instagram!
“Forgive me for what I just said. I truly know nothing,” Eisenberg added. “I should’ve caveated this by saying it’s the first time I’ve drank a coffee in a week, and my kid drank a sip too, so we’re both nuts.”
Speaking of his kid, though, Eisenberg has a child who was born in 2017—and who he credits with helping him significantly mellow out through the years (although “Today is not a good example of that,” he admits). He says his anxiety used to manifest in ways where he would jump from one worry to the next. He’d worry there would be a storm. And then when there’s no storm, he’d worry that it must be a drought.
Having a child, he says, forced him to focus on real, tangible things in the world—and move away from worst-case scenario hypotheticals.
“Like, oh, this is a real thing,” he said. “This person needs to eat, and to be dressed. And, so, suddenly, all these fantastical fears that would keep me up at night are now related to a real thing, and that’s much healthier.”
The 2nd annual Men’s Health Lab was hosted by Hearst Magazines in partnership with NYU Langone Health and presented by Boehringer Ingelheim and Gilead, with special thanks to Ensure Max Protein.
