Jesse Eisenberg to play hero mime artist in WWII movie

US actor Jesse Eisenberg is set to play a famed mime artist who helps save Jewish children during the French resistance in World War II. The Hollywood Reporter said Saturday that Resistance will star the Jewish-American actor, who played Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, as Marcel Marceau.

The mime artist became famous as Bip The Clown and is thought to have inspired Michael Jackson’s moonwalk dance. Marceau, who died in 2007, was the son of a kosher butcher who was killed at Auschwitz.

As part of the French resistance to Nazi occupation, Marceau helped rescue Jewish orphans whose parents had been killed, and went on to perform his mime act all over the world for more than half a century.

His first major performance was to thousands of US troops after the liberation of Paris in 1944.

Marceau’s son Baptiste Marceau has been closely involved in researching the film and will serve as executive producer, The Hollywood Reporter said.

American-Venezuelan producer Claudine Jakubowicz is set to produce the movie. She retweeted a message from her husband, the director Jonathan Jakubowicz, saying, “Difficult to share good news with so much pain in the streets of Venezuela. But sometimes Resistance can give birth to art.”