Jeremy Strong’s Zuckerberg Commands the Room in Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning

Viewers who caught the first trailer for The Social Reckoning left with a clear impression. Aaron Sorkin has come back to the story he shaped more than fifteen years ago, and this time he holds the camera as well as the pen. The footage signals a shift from origin tale to a harder look at what happened once the platform grew into something no one in those early days could have fully predicted.

Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay for The Social Network in 2010, portraying Jesse Eisenberg as a driven young Zuckerberg during Facebook’s difficult early years. David Fincher directed the film with accuracy, and it paid off, garnering Sorkin an Oscar and strong box office results. The sequel effectively takes the prior film as a starting point, but rather than a direct continuation, it jumps ahead around 16 years and investigates the forces that finally grew around the firm.

Mikey Madison portrays Facebook engineer Frances Haugen, who discovers some unsettling internal studies. According to the documents, Facebook had already researched and was aware of the harms it was causing, such as how it affected young users and allowed truly horrific stuff to propagate around the world. Haugen believes that this knowledge should be made public, so he contacts a reporter recognized for diving into sensitive topics. Jeremy Allen White portrays Jeff Horwitz, a Wall Street Journal writer.

Their early conversations set the tone for the remainder of the trailer. Haugen tells Horwitz that she is seeking to help Facebook develop rather than destroy it, and her words have a significant impact. You’re left wondering what comes next. The trailer then shifts to the opposing side of the conflict, starring Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, who is older and more at ease in authority. Strong brings a completely consistent and unwavering quality to the role. We see him pretend to be a free speech absolutist one minute, then argue that he is not the one who is lying.

The sequences in which Zuckerberg prepares to speak in Congress lend complexity to the situation. Strong’s Zuckerberg is sitting with his advisors, trying to think out what to say, and at one point he refers to himself as a “professional defendant,” as if he is an expert at defending himself in formal situations. Those scenes give the peculiar sense of being both routine and high stakes at the same time, as if the actor has spent years dealing with similar situations and has developed his own approach to dealing with them.

Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, and Billy Magnussen appear in supporting roles. They travel in and out of offices, newsrooms, and corporate spaces, all of which act as backdrops for the story’s central conflict. The entire ensemble alluded to the multiple interests that will be tugging in different directions once the internal documents are made public. Sorkin highlighted why he wanted to revisit this topic, claiming that Facebook’s algorithm has now invaded almost every facet of human life and influences so much of what we do on a daily basis. The concept is inspired on the actual events that led to the Wall Street Journal’s 2021 Facebook Files series. Sony Pictures plans to release it on October 9th.