Oscar-nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg now has a brief biography at Who2. Eisenberg starred in the David Fincher movie The Social Network.
Jesse Eisenberg plays Facebook fella Mark Zuckerberg. Eisenberg and Zuckerberg are not related. Their last names aren’t even the same. It just seems that way. In German, Eisenberg means “Iron Mountain,” but Zuckerberg means “Sugar Mountain.” Go look it up (I won’t).
Jesse isn’t the only acting Eisenberg from New Jersey. His little sister is Hallie Kate Eisenberg. When she was four years old she went with Jesse to a meeting with a talent agency and she was discovered.
She ended up on the big screen, playing a parrot’s pal in the 1998 movie Paulie, Russell Crowe‘s daughter in 1999’s The Insider and a slavemaster to Robin Williams in 1999’s Bicentennial Man.
And, more famously, Hallie Kate Eisenberg was the “Pepsi Girl” of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the star of a series of television commercials and cinema PSAs. You couldn’t escape her in those days. Every outing to a movie theater involved enduring the dreaded Pepsi Girl, with her cavernous dimples and that too-cute squeak of “thank you!” when she finally got the Pepsi she demanded.
The Pepsi Girl was so overexposed that movie audiences began booing her after a while.
Here’s a sample of the kind of commercials you’d see on TV, with Hallie Kate channeling the voice of Aretha Franklin:
Hallie Kate is still acting, by the way. She appeared with brother Jesse last year in the film Holy Rollers.
To read more about her, try this 2001 piece from The New York Observer. She’s talented and ambitious, and her mom worked as a clown for 15 years before quitting to be Hallie’s Stage Mom.
Or you can read this interview from 2006.
And this page has a photo of Hallie Kate Eisenberg and Jesse Eisenberg at a 2008 gala for Farm Sanctuary, the animal advocacy group.
Now you know about Hallie Kate Eisenberg, and that’s just that much more to know about Jesse Eisenberg.
(Special thanks to Adam Duvander for bringing the Pepsi Girl back into my conciousness.)