Jeremy Strong treated co-stars how Mark Zuckerberg treats people on ‘The Social Reckoning’ set, says Aaron Sorkin

The Social Reckoning director Aaron Sorkin has said star Jeremy Strong treated people on the set of the film as he imagined his character Mark Zuckerberg would.

The Succession actor is famed for his method approach to acting, with Sorkin sharing with The New York Times how Strong prepared for the role, including corresponding with the Facebook co-founder without consulting him.

The writer admitted he was “not shocked” that Strong didn’t tell him about it, sharing: “Jeremy does a lot of his own work. He does a tremendous amount of work before he shows up on your set. He did not speak in his own voice on the set or walk the way Jeremy walks.

“I told all the other actors in his scenes: ‘Guys, he’s not going to be hanging out with you at craft service. He’s not going to be yucking it up with you between takes. He’s probably not going to speak to you at all. He is going to treat you the way he imagines Mark treats the people around him.’ And that’s what happened. You cannot argue with the results.”

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The Social Reckoning acts as a sequel to the Sorkin-written 2010 film The Social Network and focuses on the 2021 Facebook Files investigation as whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) and Wall Street Journal journalist Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) expose harmful internal practices at Meta. Strong takes over the role of Zuckerberg from Jesse Eisenberg, who played the tech titan in The Social Network.

Strong’s method approach recently saw him speaking in a Polish accent for an interview with GQ, something he had been doing for seven months while filming a remake of The Boys From Brazil.

He explained in the interview: “I don’t want it to feel like an accent. I want it to just be a person, and that’s their voice—and our voice is the most individual thing about us.”

Sorkin added: “He called me six or eight weeks ago, and without any introduction, he was just speaking as an Eastern European Nazi hunter, talking to me about the movie we had just made, without saying, ‘Hey, listen, this is going to sound strange, but.…’”

“A big, big part, for me, of being an actor, is just walking right through those fears,” Strong further explained. “It’s just about committing to it. It’s like, I can tell if I have not crossed that Rubicon.

“And sometimes you have to be willing to be uncomfortable, or make other people uncomfortable. At the end of the day, the literal only thing that matters to me is what’s going to end up on screen. That is the only thing. And I’ll take the hits in order to try to fully do that.”

However, former Succession co-star Brian Cox has previously criticised Strong’s approach, admitting he found it “fucking annoying” and “American shit”, and that his co-star “begged” him to stop talking about it in interviews.