Top five reasons everyone’s hating on Jesse Eisenberg

Lately the “Now You See Me” actor has received lots of flak–from straight up “Jesse Eisenberg made female reporter cry” type headlines to more creative entries, such as Gawker’s “Dick or Not a Dick: Jesse Eisenberg.”

What’s the deal? We decided to put our analyst hats on and take a deeper look into this (admittedly not very perplexing) trend.

1. Way up at the tippy top of this list, towering above all other reasons, is the now viral interview Eisenberg did with Romina Puga for Fusion (a “fusion,” you might say, of ABC and Univision). Yes, it’s possible he was frustrated from talking to a million and one reporters as part of his recent press junket, or that Puga was genuinely annoying, or that his cat died. Still, there’s simply just no getting around the fact that Eisenberg was really mean.

“Do you know the comedian Carrot Top?” he asks Puga, who affirms that she does indeed know of Carrot Top, and that she thinks he’s terrible. “Well you are like the Carrot Top of interviewers.” Yep, it’s that bad.

2. In case it was unclear that Puga was crushed after the interview, she posted a recap on Tumblr, in which she hammers home how just how awful he was to her with several “UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH”s.

She also fills us in on what happened when the cameras stopped rolling. “I went behind a curtain to wait for the memory cards from the interview. I peaked around the curtain to ask Jesse about his neighborhood in New York (he lives a few blocks from where I used to live) and he immediately says, “You’re still here?” (Apparently “self-esteem butchering” can lead to spelling butchering. “Peaked”?)

3. Eisenbeg played the highly unlikeable Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network.” It’s hard to look at the guy without thinking of that role, so it’s possible we (and the Eisenberg-skewering media) have brought some of that baggage along to our viral video viewing.

4. He’s pretty good looking. Another awkward young indie actor to come under fire recently is Michael Cera, as Flavorwire points out. So why doesn’t Cera get people this angry? Well, for one thing, he never attacked an attractive reporter for referring to Morgan Freeman as just “Freeman.” More than that, though, it’s easier to villify a nerdy handsome guy than it is to villify a guy who is simply nerdy.

5. He probably is sort of a jerk. Have you seen that video?