The second actor to portray Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted to approach his performance with “respect,” so he reached out directly to the Facebook founder.
Oscar nominee and Succession star Jeremy Strong will take over the role of Zuckerberg from Jesse Eisenberg in the sequel to Aaron Sorkin’s take on the rise of Facebook, The Social Reckoning. Strong debuted his uncanny Zuckerberg portrayal in the film’s first trailer in June, but on Wednesday revealed to GQ that he reached out to Zuckerberg with a message.
“I’m probably going to give Sony an aneurysm” by admitting this, Strong said, but “I wrote to him.” The actor confirmed that he received a response, but not its contents.
The move was a bold one, as Zuckerberg has expressed his displeasure about his portrayal in the first film. The 2010 film “made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful,” he said at a Facebook Q&A in 2014.
The Meta founder also argued for the importance of a “diverse” workforce at the time, telling the audience that “Companies that are more diverse do better.” Since Trump took office the second time last year, he’s increasingly embraced the president—including by eliminating the company’s Diversity department and canceling its inclusion programs.
Eisenberg turned down the offer to reprise his role as Zuckerberg, which earned him his first Oscar nomination, citing Zuckerberg’s changed persona. He no longer wanted to be “associated” with “this guy that’s doing things that are problematic—taking away fact-checking and safety concerns, making people who are already threatened in this world more threatened,” he told BBC Radio’s Today last February.
Strong, who plays an older version of Zuckerberg in the new film, said that despite changing attitudes about the CEO, he wanted him to know, “I take this responsibility very seriously, and the veracity of it seriously, and I’m approaching it with respect.” He also told GQ that he’d turn down an invite to hang out with Zuckerberg if asked. The star was nominated for an Oscar last year for his role as another real-life controversial figure, Donald Trump’s late fixer Roy Cohn in The Apprentice.
Strong was confronted about “humanizing” Cohn as a character in an interview with Stephen Colbert last year, to which he replied, “It’s a dangerous idea that you could portray someone as ‘too human.’”
He added that the Trump biopic “is not a polemic. It is not partisan. It’s not trying to tell you who to vote for. It’s trying to examine these individuals and take them seriously as human beings, which is not something we tend to do. We tend to otherize and demonize and mock these people.”
He added Wednesday on Zuckerberg, “Listen, I know that he is a reviled person and not a popular person in our culture, but I do not think you should have an actor playing him who wants to set out to condemn him.”
The film is not expected to be particularly sympathetic to Zuckerberg, as Sorkin, who serves as both writer and director on the film, teased the film in 2024, “I blame Facebook for January 6.”
The Social Reckoning is set to hit theaters on October 9.
