Jesse Eisenberg is voluntarily planning to donate one of his kidneys to a complete stranger in less than two months.
“I’m actually donating my kidney in six weeks. I really am,” Eisenberg, 42, said on the Thursday, October 30, episode of the Today show, after helping the morning show set up its blood drive. “I don’t know why. I got bitten by the blood donation bug [and] I love it. I’m doing an altruistic donation [in] mid-December. I’m so excited to do it.”
Organs donated altruistically come from individuals who make nondirected donations to recipients they don’t know, according to the Mayo Clinic. (Other organ donations are transplanted from a relative or a person with the same blood type matched via a universal registry.)
“It’s essentially risk-free and so needed,” the Now You See Me: Now You Don’t actor told Today. “I think people will realize that it’s a no-brainer, if you have the time and the inclination.”
Eisenberg first expressed interest in donating an organ — altruistic donors usually donate a kidney — 10 years ago after speaking with medical professionals.
“Let’s say person X needs a kidney in Kansas City, [and] their child or whoever was going to donate to them is, for whatever set of reasons, not a match, but somehow I am,” Eisenberg explained to the outlet. “That person can still get my kidney and hopefully that child of that person still donates their kidney, right? It goes to a bank where that person can find a match recipient, but it only works if there is basically an altruistic donor.”
Eisenberg also registered for the National Kidney Foundation’s family voucher program, so that any of his relatives would be prioritized on the list should they ever need the organ.
“It’s risk-free for my family, as well,” he added.
Eisenberg’s family includes his wife, Anna Strout, and their 7-year-old son Banner.
“My general feeling is I spent the first 35, sorry 33 years of my life worrying about myself,” Eisenberg previously told People in March 2024, detailing how parenthood changed his life. “A lot of these concerns were just narcissistic, self-involved, fantastical problems that I created to just ruin my life.”
He continued, “Then I spent the next seven years of my life worrying about real things, worrying about another person. I know it sounds like a self-serving excuse, but it’s made me a lot happier.”
Eisenberg previously revealed that Banner takes after Strout, 42, to his personal excitement.
“I was just praying, probably like a lot of parents, ‘Please don’t have all the things I have that I hate about myself,’” he said on the Today show in 2023. “I married an amazing woman, I’m praying, ‘Just be like her, just be like her, please just be everything like her.’ And for the most part, he’s heading in that direction which is the superior choice.”
Eisenberg and Strout, a writer and producer, have been together since 2015. They tied the knot two years later, months after welcoming Banner.
