Submit Podcast or Channel

Jeremy Strong on Playing Mark Zuckerberg and Other Unpopular Characters

October 2, 20260 comments♥ 0
00:02 The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In 2010, when the film The Social Network came out, Facebook itself was only six years old. YouTube and Twitter, they were even younger. Social media was remaking the Internet as we knew it. And the Wiz Kid, Mark Zuckerberg, who famously dropped out of Harvard to launch Facebook to the world when he was barely old enough to drink, he was hailed as a genius. 16 years later, the world looks very different because of social media.
00:38 The pushback against Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms is obviously enormous. Mark Zuckerberg in some quarters looks like public enemy number one. The 2010 film was written by Aaron Sorkin, and Sorkin brings us back to Zuckerberg's story now in a sequel, The Social Reckoning. I am here to help Facebook, not hurt it, okay? You send me a message. What would you like to talk about? That film is set around 2021, as Facebook was dealing with leaks from a whistleblower about the harm it was causing.
01:11 Public perception was beginning to turn severely for the worse. People around here understand that when I say no, that's the end of the debate. I'm not two years out of a dorm room anymore, Charlie. Look around. And playing Mark Zuckerberg is one of the best actors working today. Somebody who thinks very, very hard, very serious. seriously about how to inhabit a complicated character, Jeremy Strong. I go to a screening of this new movie, and you haven't even opened your mouth where I was thrown back in my chair, just the physicality of you, your posture, your physical bearing.
01:55 And then, of course, it's interacting with my memory of him testifying in Congress and all this kind of thing. There's a certain kind of magic that's already happened without you opening your mouth yet. And I want to know what goes into that. Well, first of all, that means the absolute world to me coming from you. Thank you. My task is to kind of surround the subject as completely as possible. leave no stone unturned in a kind of investigative mission to learn everything about them, both intellectually and viscerally.
02:43 And the visceral part is more important because it's ultimately a non-intellectual process, unconscious process. I'm not thinking about my posture, how I hold my mouth or jaw line. I'm not thinking about the voice. all of that by the time you walk onto a set, and if it hasn't, you're in trouble,
03:04 has to have become second skin. There's another aspect here is that you've got 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 Aaron Sorkin your director plays
03:23 or does he leave creating the character entirely to you. I love the first. movie, and I think Jesse's a great actor, I didn't really think about what he did in that film. That wasn't really something I ever thought about. 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, you know, that might have an effect. And I think the goal is to own it
04:02 and 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 quote unquote 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 mean,
04:23 I have to attempt to create a character or embody a character with such belief and conviction that you might accept it and you might suspend your disbelief. You might forget about Jesse. You might even forget about what Mark looked like in 2019 in front of Congress. And so that's my only goal. 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 first movie.
04:58 The first movie. Sure. And by now, he's at a different level of wealth and power and influence that was unimaginable even to him. And you reach out to him. You write him a letter? Is that right?
05:13 I wrote him an email. And 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
05:41 and veracity as much as possible. And what do you hear from him? Well, the response, I don't feel that I can speak to that because it 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.
06:05 And 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
06:23 hear it in the speech rhythms and the And the way it's very Sorkinian. Yes. Even to the point where he parodies himself a couple of times and, you know, can we have the room, I think somebody says at some point in a kind of West Wingy way of self-awareness. You know, I think one of the things that I was trying to understand was this transition into a wartime CEO, 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, you know, we've had 2016 election interference by state actors. We've had the Macedonian trolls misinformation campaign.
07:14 We've had Rohingya violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar in 2014. You know, 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, under investigation by the FBI, the DOJ, the SEC, the FTC, by 2019, and also by 2019, a hundred billion pieces of information flowing across their platforms every day. So part of my job in understanding him and sort of fighting his fight is, and this is going to be
08:09 an unpopular thing to say in this climate, is trying to have a kind of empathy, an empathetic understanding of this person's struggle. But the empathy is not a political empathy. It's an empathy of trying to imagine yourself as that person, and seeing the world as he might. Yes, it's a, I would say, the empathy is a necessary and perhaps the vital component of this art form, which is to be, in a sense, impartial.
08:39 I am representing him. You know, Aaron said that when he writes a character, It's as if that character is arguing to God why he should be admitted to heaven. And I think I would recuse myself from playing the role if I was going to inject my own subjective judgment or condemnation of a character. Did you change your view of Mark Zuckerberg when you started out as just a citizen who, like anybody, was reading about him, was watching him. did the process of going so deep on him as a character and then playing him, change your view of the human? Sure. How so?
09:26 I mean, when I tried to put myself in these shoes and feel the weight of these incredibly complex, front-line decisions that have no precedent in the history of humankind, weighing on the one hand, free speech, and on the other hand, safety. Because ultimately, every content moderation decision is about those things. Voice versus harm. On the margins, those issues are incredibly complex. So that gave me a different kind of empathy for the person and people having to make those decisions and failing to make them perfectly. Now, I should say I'm not ambivalent about, you know, how bad, short-term, dopamine-driven
10:27 feedback loops are on the mental health of our young people. I'm not ambivalent to those things. I'm not ambivalent to the heinous fallacies of Alex Jones or to Holocaust denialism being on some of those platforms. just to be really clear about that, I think those things are unequivocally wrong. You played Roy Cohn, and I wonder, when the person, when it's so hard to find the good in them, like Roy Cohn, maybe I'm getting it wrong. That seems like a really hard task for an actor. Well, you know, Roy Cohn was called by someone, the pole star of human evil.
11:12 And Ken Oletta told me he was the most monstrous person he'd ever encountered. So yes, that is hard. And I'm not sure looking for the good is the right way to frame it. What you're saying is not looking for the good, but looking for how that person sees himself and the world is the important thing. Yeah, I mean, I think you're trying to see through their eyes and you're trying to understand their struggle. Who's the model for you?
11:42 Who's the actor that exemplifies both in process and result what you'd like to be? You had a Daniel DeLewis figure in your past. Sure. Yeah, I mean, Daniel, you know, I worked for Daniel as his assistant, which was a profound and revelatory experience for me. And of course, he's someone that so many of us have been so inspired by, his commitment, his resolve, his willingness to, you know, in his words, make a fool of himself, you know, to go out on the limb. But this, you know, Merrill is certainly somebody that we all feel that way about as well.
12:26 Merrill Streep. Dustin Hoffman, you know, who recently said to me, I don't know how I did it. And you feel like you'll never be able to do it again each time. I'm speaking with the actor Jeremy Strong. He stars in The Social Reckoning, a new film about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.
12:51 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking today with Jeremy Strong. Strong stars as Mark Zuckerberg in the Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin's latest film. Many critics consider Jeremy Strong the Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino of today.
13:27 He's played Kendall Roy on Succession, along with Roy Cohn, in The Apprentice and recently Bruce Springsteen's manager, John Landau. He's well known in Hollywood for an immensely intense level of preparation for his roles. For example, he might stay in character for long stretches of time during filming or speak only in the accent of his character even while off the set. We'll continue our conversation now. How much is your approach helpful to a director and your fellow castmates?
14:03 how much does it throw them off? You're super involved in these things. When you did your own research on Roy Cohn for The Apprentice, for example, you ended up, you yourself, adding a scene to the movie that wasn't in the script that had to do with diamond cufflinks,
14:18 if I remember. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that something that's appreciated by the people around you, or how does this work? I mean... You're laughing. No, I mean, I think
14:32 I can't really speak to that. Of course, some people seem to have been, it is never my intention to interfere with anyone else's experience or anyone else's way of working. First, do no harm, right? Right. But commit to your fucking, to what you're doing.
14:58 And utterly. Meaning you get frustrated sometimes with other people who are not? No, just meaning that I'm just there to commit utterly to serving the material. Right. And so if some people feel
15:13 that I'm taking it too seriously or it changes the molecules in the room in a way that makes something uncomfortable, I guess that's something that I don't feel that I need to apologize for because I believe, and I think the directors that I work with, all believe that it's in service of the material. And I personally think that a lot of the reactions to it are of a personal nature. That hurt?
15:54 What do you mean? Well, let's talk about what we're talking about in this sense. So we met last year at the Telluride Film Festival. I saw you and I really admire you. And I'd seen you in any number of films. And I thought I should walk in the other direction because we had published a profile of you by Michael Schulman in 2021
16:15 that I read as something that was about a serious artist being not self-serious in the derisive sense, but serious. And yeah, there were people in it that, you know, poked fun at your method and because they did it a different way. And I read it an entirely different way. I did not read this as a profile
16:38 that was making fun of somebody above all or anything of the like. But I know that you were hurt by it, at least in the immediate aftermath of it, that you didn't like it and saw it as a betrayal of trust, I think is the phrase you used. And these moments of what you,
16:54 which I admired, your honesty in the way, that piece and openness, that's what was rare about it and startling. But you didn't feel that way, certainly not in the immediate aftermath. I would only say that what I shared, what I talked about is a betrayal of trust. I feel like, you know, it could have been met with, because I've had other different experiences with different journalists. It perhaps could have been met with more compassion. And that's what I would have wished for.
17:37 But listen, you know, all's fair and love and war. So I think the thing about this film, this work, the work that I care most about, Roy Cohn, you know, these are right on the fault line of everything that's going on in our world right now. And so if I take my job seriously, it is commensurate with the kind of subjects that I feel that I'm working on. You went on the, did a Super Bowl commercial to make fun of your own seriousness in the wake of that profile. A Dunkin' Donuts commercial, which was pretty hilarious. Why did you do that? Did you feel you had to take the air out of that imagery of self-seriousness? No, you know, to be honest.
18:22 We just have fun. It was really that I was asked to do it, Ben Affleck asked me to do it, and the pitch of what it was was not something that excited me. So you rewrote it. And then I rewrote it and just had an image of, I think it's Marty Sheen and Apocalypse Now coming out of that sludge. And I sort of had like a middle of the night image of somebody coming out of coffee beans. So it just evolved from there. There's nothing, you know, it wasn't.
18:48 But the Ineim play was a response to that profile for me. Because Ibsen had written ghosts, which he felt like was. a deeply personal expression that was met with ridicule and scorn by people who he thought would meet it with understanding and approbation and enemy of the people, which is, you know, about someone attempting to tell the truth to a community who sees himself as a servant of the people but is called instead an enemy of the people. you know, this ongoing question about like, how do other act,
19:27 how does it make other actors feel? It feels along those lines of trying to make me into an enemy of the people when I strongly see my job as a servant of, not that's what you're trying to do. In a million years, I wouldn't have read it like that. But, I'm not you.
19:46 But, you know, I think that what Aaron is doing, the social reckoning is about this, the big question of this movie, and I think a question that hangs over, you know, like the sort of Damocles over some of these CEOs, is the question that was asked to Benjamin Franklin in 1787 outside the Constitutional Convention. You know, what have you given us? A republic if you can keep it. And I think that, you know, those are, you know, those are. That's what's at stake in this movie, as Aaron sees it. These issues of truth decay, of the denial of truth. You know, these things are so potent and they're so important that to me it warrants just being completely all in to show up and give these things everything I can possibly give them. So, yeah, if I have a Polish voice for those seven months, which is for another film, which is for this Peter Morgan film of the boys from Brazil, that's just, you know, that's much ado about nothing.
21:02 Meaning it's in service to something. Yeah, yeah. You were in a film about the Chicago 7. You played Jerry Rubin, who was the great comedian radical of that group. Yeah. I remember as a kid reading his classic book, Do It. Yeah, great book. And at one point, you wanted Aaron Sorkin to spray you with tear gas, you know,
21:26 for the very similitude of what was happening at this demonstration. And Aaron Sorkin took your suggestion in his telling, but he decided that it might hurt a lot of people. But it was an example of your, you know, some would call it craziness, and others would call devotion to the craft or the need for some sense of realism. Sure. Well, I just, you know,
21:51 what is that all about that? I want to kind of demythologize that a little bit because, you know, first of all, what you're alluding to is what happened in Grant Park between the Chicago police and the Yippies and everyone. Democratic Convention of 68. Yeah, everyone who was protesting the war in Vietnam and the Democratic Convention.
22:10 And, you know, if you watch Haskell Wex, Michael documentary medium, cool, you're right in there and you feel this sort of authoritarian police state and the incredible violence that was happening. So I think what I want to do is capture what was at stake and what was happening and what those people were putting themselves through what they were putting on the line. Now, what I wanted to do, I want to be very clear, involve no one else and would have involved no one else. it was, you know, for the purpose of a close-up and to have the physiological effects of what that would be. Of your eyes burning. So that I, you know, I don't really, you know, the goal in a sense,
22:54 you know, Brando put himself in a bathtub of ice once to get a certain effect of numbness. You don't want to act is the point. You don't ever want to act. You, I had seen you, as we all had, in smaller roles, but then succession came along. And you play this incredibly complex, sad, damaged, intelligent, unaware, just an incredibly complicated character.
23:26 But this one is neither entirely made up nor based in a very clear way on a character like Mark Zuckerberg. When you're looking at it through the lens of the Murdox, which is the most obvious model. Is it there for you just to pick and choose from characteristics? How did you create the character of Kendall Roy in concert with your colleagues? Yeah, I think you're like a detective and you're just looking for clues. So you read everything. Each time it's different.
24:00 You really kind of start from nothing every time. But this time around, you don't contact James Murdoch or anything. No, because also I don't think it was certainly that family along with. with a lot of other families are in the genome of what Jesse wrote, but it's not a one-to-one. It's not, I would say, about them. Have you ever indulged in therapy, and if so, is it helpful in this work? I mean, sure, I've had therapy. I've read a lot about psychology.
24:38 I'm married to a psychiatrist. Is it helpful in this work? Not really. Because, I mean, insofar as it gives you a deeper understanding of human psychology, sure. But an understanding of yourself and your resources. I'm not sure yourself, you know, what I'm trying to do is disappear into a role. That's what my heroes did. That's what, when you see Ben Kingsley play Simon Reesenthal,
25:14 in the murderers among us, and then you see him play out of Eichmann, you know, a few years ago. Like, I don't see the guy anymore. I just see those characters. So that, for me, has always been the Holy Grail. Do you care how he will react to this film, how Mark Zuckerberg will encounter this film?
25:36 I do, yeah, I do. You do? Yeah. What reaction would disappoint you or upset you? I mean, I think my hope is that the film is a dialectic rather than a polemic, rather than there's a kind of trend generally of like it's all Facebook's fault, like all of it, everything. Now, including the weather. Yeah, just it's all their fault. And I don't think that that is a, you know, when we talk about truth decay and the deterioration of civil discourse, course, our storytelling plays a really important role in that. So I personally, and it's why I reached
26:21 out to Mark and my feelings as we were doing it, because I was defending him a lot when we were making the film to my director. What were you defending to Aaron Sorkin, specifically? Just arguing for Mark's point of view, arguing for... Because you thought he was right, or you thought that's how he would see the world? That's how he would see the world. It's a big difference. Yeah, I mean, I sent Aaron emails as Mark sometimes at night. I see. But I'm not, I've taken Jeremy out of this at that point, which I know sounds crazy, but it's really not. It's about sort of negative space.
26:57 You want to create room to enter into this other person's experience. Is there an afterlife to it? You finish a roll. It's wrapped. It's ready to air. Does it still live inside you, or is it gone? I think I'm changed by some of these things. You know, they take you places, experientially.
27:20 I always answer with other people's words because they're better than mine. So I'll say there's a poem that I really love by Stanley Cunits that you might know called The Layers. And he writes, I have walked through many lives, some of them my own. And I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides from which I struggle not to stray. Jeremy Strong, thank you. Thanks, David. Jeremy Strong. He plays Mark Zuckerberg in the social reckoning, which opens next week. And you can read our profile of Jeremy Strong by Michael Shulman at New Yorker.com.
28:00 And you can subscribe to the magazine there as well, New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for listening. I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Adam Howard, David Krasnell, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Elliot Wright, Erica Huang,
28:39 and we had assistance this week from Pran Bandy. And farewell this week to our colleague and friend, Alejandra, Deccant. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.