Nearly 2 Million People Watched Jesse Eisenberg Explain The Unusual Reason He Feels “Guilty” Taking Vacations

If there’s one type of character Jesse Eisenberg is known for playing, it’s guys with a wee bit of stress. OK, sometimes it’s full-blown anxiety.

Whether it was his Oscar-nominated turn as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network or his critically acclaimed role in the FX/Hulu miniseries Fleishman Is in Trouble, Jesse has a knack for personifying jittery characters.

He’s playing another one in his new film A Real Pain, which he also wrote and directed. The film follows Jesse as a disciplined guy and Kieran Culkin as his laissez-faire cousin taking a trip to Poland. It’s earned rave reviews.

Earlier this month, A Real Pain received two Oscar nominations. Jesse is up for Best Original Screenplay, while Kieran is competing for Best Supporting Actor.

Jesse stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live! last week to talk about the movie, but one anecdote he shared about his vacation habits…or lack thereof…really caught people’s attention.

While discussing travel habits, Jimmy asked Jesse if he goes on vacations, which prompted the actor to say, “I don’t like vacations.”

Of course, he explained why. “I feel too guilty to go on a vacation. I have a very good life,” he said, noting that working as a film actor has him feeling “lucky” since he regularly travels for work.

As a result, he isn’t prone to laid-back vacations. “I can’t do that because I’m riddled with guilt,” he said.

He noted his vacation habits are more in line with that of his and Kieran’s A Real Pain characters who traveled to Poland for a Holocaust tour. “Those are the travels I do,” he said, using his last two vacations as an example. One was to a concentration camp in Austria, and the other was with his family to Timisoara, Romania, which is where the 1989 Communist revolutions began.

“That’s the only time I could go on vacation and not hate myself,” he said of the Romanian trip.

Jesse later admitted he hasn’t told his son about Disney World. “I went to Disneyland during his lifetime without him,” he said. “I was doing something in Shanghai, and they took me to Shanghai Disney. I told him about it and he said, ‘It sounded interesting, but when are we going back to Rwanda?’”

The interview moment went viral on the late-night show’s TikTok page, garnering nearly 2 million views. In the comments, people were amused by Jesse’s self-deprecating humor about his stress.

“He is the personification of anxiety ,” one person wrote.

“i feel his anxiety through the phone,” another said.

Someone even noted he should’ve voiced Anxiety in Inside Out 2, which would have been genius casting.

Someone saw their own anxiety in Jesse, commenting, “I’ve never seen someone as anxious as me.”

And another summed up the moment best, saying, “As nervous as he looks, he is actually hilarious.” Because if you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?

You can watch the clip on TikTok and read all the great comments here.