Who to play Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most important decisions made in creating The Social Reckoning. With this, writer-director Aaron Sorkin chose to collaborate once more with Jeremy Strong. They’ve worked together on Molly’s Game and The Trial of the Chicago 7, and Jeremy Strong has since then received accolades such as Golden Globe and Emmy wins for his role as Kendall Roy in Succession, and an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Roy Cohn in The Apprentice.
Strong is now taking on another real-life character in The Social Reckoning, which explores the insidious power algorithms in social media, and how whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), and reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) exposed Facebook’s knowledge of its harm on the public.
For Sorkin, Strong played the role of Zuckerberg flawlessly. ‘Jeremy is a truly brilliant actor who gave us a breathtaking performance. On set, he was never anything but Mark Zuckerberg. He talked with Mark’s voice, moved with Mark’s posture, and defended Mark’s point-of-view in every scene,’ he says.
Strong felt the importance of stepping into the shoes of a real, living person, and did his due diligence in preparing for the role. ‘I feel a deep sense of responsibility when portraying real people and do exhaustive research and preparation,’ he explains. ‘I amassed what amounted to a longitudinal record of Zuckerberg’s evolution from every scrap of available source material for the decade spanning from 2010 to 2020.’
There was an abundance of material to go through, as Strong’s character has been exhaustively covered in various forms of media. ‘The primary source materials were every magazine profile, every interview, talk, personal post, panel, summit, and written text. I would say those that most informed me were the New Yorker profiles of 2006, 2010, and 2017; Kara Swisher’s interviews, the Ezra Klein interview, the F8 Conferences and Facebook Town Halls, the 2019 Technology and Society conversation series, the Silicon Slopes tech summit, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the 2019 Georgetown speech, and most importantly, all 8 Congressional hearings. I also read several books about Zuckerberg and the tech sector in general. The goal for me is always to gain domain expertise and a sense of authority in order to create something with accuracy and veracity.’
The actor also gave importance to the exact timeframe the audience is meeting Zuckerberg, as this was a very tumultuous time for Facebook and its chairman. ‘He is having to make incredibly complex frontline decisions with unprecedently large consequences for civilization. I would say he is between a Gibraltar and a hard place,’ Strong says. ‘He has connected the world and given people a voice and is now having to contend with both the intended and unintended consequences of his vision at scale. My job was to the best of my ability to understand his mission, understand the principles guiding him, and weigh the dilemmas facing the leader of one of the most influential and consequential companies in the history of the world.’
Strong admits that he was also very keen on working with Sorkin again, as he feels that he collaborates really well with the filmmaker. ‘This is my third film with Aaron, and I feel a tremendous sense of kinship and creative alliance with him. We work within a force field of implicit trust,’ says Strong. ‘Aaron is one of the greatest dramatists of our time and one of the best writers in film history. He is in a very small pantheon, and it has been one of the highest privileges of my life to have this ongoing collaboration with him. He inspires in you a desire to be worthy of his masterful writing. It is very easy to be precise with Aaron’s writing because it is as close to perfect as one might ever get; it’s like being first chair violin for Mozart himself.’
The Social Reckoning arrives in Philippine cinemas on October 7.