Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/FX
Like many self-conscious teen girls who loved boys in the 2010s, I once nursed a hardcore crush on Jesse Eisenberg. I mean hardcore: I cut out photos of him from magazines to tape to my dorm room wall. I watched and rewatched every possible interview clip of his on YouTube. I slept underneath a giant poster of The Social Network above my bed. (I was in love with Andrew Garfield too, of course.)
I loved him for what I perceived to be his gentle, kind, introspective nature. But a decade later, Jesse and I have both grown older. I have moved onto pining after real-life nebbishes; he’s got a wife and kid. He also went bald as Lex Luthor in Man of Steel, a look that killed whatever remaining attraction to him I had left. Yet even after accepting this reality—that Jesse Eisenberg is a nearly 40-year-old human man who does not and will not ever like me back—my inner teen was utterly scandalized by his latest project. In Fleishman Is in Trouble, now on Hulu, Eisenberg did the unthinkable: He showed his whole-ass ass and had sex with women that aren’t me.
Apologies to anyone who had to read that last part. But it’s true: Part of being a teenage fangirl is fantasizing that the celeb you’re into will want to kiss your face and all the other gross bits that come with relationships. (If my parents are reading this, I promise that I have no idea what those entail.) In Fleishman, Eisenberg—as the recently divorced, highly anxious Dr. Toby Fleishman—does a lot of fantasizing of his own. With his wife out of the picture, Toby is free to date and sleep with other women for the first time in his adult life. He hops on the apps in the hopes of satisfying his sexual urges, chasing after women big-boobed and small. Toby, too, has a type; it’s just not me.