TIME100 Health: Jesse Eisenberg | TIME

The donation process was straightforward, helped along by a team of doctors and mental-health professionals. Eisenberg underwent surgery on Dec. 30 (a great excuse, he jokes, for missing all the New Year’s Eve parties he prefers to avoid). Midway through the procedure, doctors received word that the intended recipient was too sick for a transplant, so Eisenberg’s organ traveled a different direction across the country to the person next in line.

Donating a kidney is considered a low-risk procedure, and donors are able to live full, healthy lives. Eisenberg says he didn’t experience any complications, went home from the hospital after three days, and now, five weeks post-op, is close to baseline again. 

“Altruistic” or “self-directed” donors, as they’re called, often maintain their anonymity rather than meeting their recipients. Eisenberg also chose not to learn who received his kidney. In the months before the procedure, his friends posed a series of what-if’s: What if the person who received his kidney had different politics? What if he wouldn’t like them in real life? 

“It was such a silly question to me, because the implication was it’s not worth helping an individual unless that individual has the same set of beliefs,” he says. “For me, it was much easier to think about the organ donation as the end in and of itself, rather than who the person is and how they’re living with the organ, because then we start getting into a  slippery slope of judgmental criteria about who deserves this thing. I don’t think of it that way.”

Did the experience change him? Maybe, he says. “I feel slightly—like I’m talking 1%—more comfortable in my own skin,” he says. In the year leading up to the procedure, he was continually lauded for his latest cinematic accomplishments, which he says made him “existentially very uncomfortable.” Now, “I in some ways have balanced the scale of being a recipient of so many things to also being helpful,” he says.

Advocates say high-profile donations like Eisenberg’s can help encourage more people to consider becoming living donors. “What’s so inspiring was how sincere he was about why he wanted to do it—and that he came out and talked openly about it,” says Kevin Longino, CEO of the National Kidney Foundation (and the recipient of a kidney transplant). “The need is so great, and the opportunity for more living donors is right there in front of us.” What surprised Eisenberg most wasn’t the physical toll, but how little emotional turmoil the decision caused. “I’m a very anxious person, but around this whole process I felt nothing but completely calm,” he says. “I don’t think of it as helping an individual as much as doing something that just feels right.”

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