Jeremy Strong Is Not Quite Over It

Another aspect here is that there was another performance of Mark Zuckerberg, as a younger man, by Jesse Eisenberg, in an earlier film written by your director, Aaron Sorkin. I’d love to know what role that plays, and what role Sorkin plays—or does he leave creating the character entirely to you?

I love the first movie, and I think Jesse’s a great actor. But I didn’t really think about what he did in that film. I thought only about Mark Zuckerberg—in the same way that when I played Roy Cohn, I didn’t go back and look at James Woods. I didn’t go back and look at Pacino, if anything, because the anxiety of influence might have had an effect. And I think the goal is to own it, to find your version, and to connect to your own inchoate instincts and let your intuition guide you.

Is this a harder thing to do when you’re playing somebody who’s “real” as opposed to somebody who’s made up by a screenwriter?

Yeah, I think it’s a different set of challenges. And in this case I had to attempt to embody a character with such belief and conviction that you might accept it and suspend your disbelief. You might forget about Jesse, you might even forget about what Mark looked like in 2019 in front of Congress. That was my only goal. And anything that didn’t serve that goal, I jettisoned.

As far as Aaron is concerned, Aaron is as great a writer as cinema has ever had, I think. So he’s given me—it’s like the golden record—it’s like a near-perfect piece of text, which is very rare. In a sense, the text is all you need. You need to prepare the life to meet the text, but the text will take you there.

I think by now, a lot of people are, to put it mildly, fed up with Mark Zuckerberg in a way they weren’t necessarily when they went to see “The Social Network.” And by now he’s at a level of wealth, power, and influence that was unimaginable even to him. And you reached out to him—you wrote him a letter, is that right?

I wrote him an e-mail.

What did it say, and what were you looking for?

I essentially said, “You’ve probably heard that I’m going to be portraying you in this film, or a character based on you. And I just want you to know that I take this very seriously, that I’m trying to learn everything, and that I’m going to approach it with respect and veracity as much as possible.”

And what did you hear from him?

I don’t feel that I can speak to that because the response was private, and I don’t want to violate that.

What was the spirit of the response?

I think the spirit of the response was hedged, but responsive. I wouldn’t say that he was grateful. I think if I were Mark, I would be rightly cautious and wary of another film being made, given that there’s a lot about the first film that is fictional. This is Aaron Sorkin’s version.

For sure. And you can hear it in the speech—it’s very Sorkinian. Even to the point where he parodies himself a couple of times. “Can we have the room?,” I think somebody says at some point, in a kind of West Wing-y way.

I think one of the things that I was trying to understand was his transition into a wartime C.E.O., essentially—somebody who’s besieged and embattled and yet determined. Someone who, it is my belief, is idealistic and principled, if wrong.

At the time the movie starts, we’ve had 2016 election interference by state actors. We’ve had the Macedonian trolls misinformation campaign. We’ve had violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, in 2014. All of these things create this intensification of pressure on this person, this crucible of pressure, contending with content moderation of hate speech, terrorist content, harmful content, child exploitation, election misinformation—all of these things. They’re under investigation by the F.B.I., the D.O.J., the S.E.C., the F.T.C., by 2019. And also, by 2019, a hundred billion pieces of information are flowing across their platforms every day.