- 4 minutes ago
The actor talks with David Remnick about portraying the Facebook founder under pressure in “The Social Reckoning,” and why Strong felt betrayed by The New Yorker’s 2021 Profile of him.
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00:00I go to a screening of this new movie, and the narrative unspools in the beginning,
00:08and then suddenly, and it's quite a while until we see you,
00:12we encounter you as Mark Zuckerberg, and you haven't even opened your mouth
00:19where I was thrown back in my chair.
00:24Just the physicality of you, your posture, your physical bearing,
00:29and then, of course, it's interacting with my memory of him testifying in Congress
00:34and all this kind of thing.
00:35There's a certain kind of magic that's already happened without you opening your mouth yet,
00:41and I want to know what goes into that.
00:46Well, first of all, that means the absolute world to me coming from you.
00:53My task is to kind of surround the subject as completely as possible,
01:03leave no stone unturned in a kind of investigative mission,
01:09to learn everything about them, both intellectually and viscerally.
01:16And the visceral part is more important because it's ultimately a non-intellectual process,
01:22unconscious process.
01:24I'm not thinking about my posture, how I hold my mouth or jawline.
01:31I'm not thinking about the voice.
01:33All of that, by the time you walk onto a set,
01:37and if it hasn't, you're in trouble, has to have become second skin.
01:41So a lot of your job is internalizing a massive amount of information
01:49so that it is absorbed and ingested and becomes your second skin.
01:54So in this case, it was, you know, really starting from, I would say, around 2010
02:02and creating for myself a sort of longitudinal record of Mark's evolution.
02:08All of the things that were happening, because my interest is understanding
02:16the character's struggle, understanding the circumstances
02:22and the dramatic circumstances that he finds himself in.
02:25There's another aspect here, is that you've got another performance of Mark Zuckerberg
02:30as a younger man by Jesse Eisenberg in an earlier film written by your director, Aaron Sorkin.
02:36Yeah.
02:37I'd love to know what role that plays, and what role Aaron Sorkin, your director, plays,
02:42or does he leave creating the character entirely to you?
02:46I loved the first movie, and I think Jesse's a great actor.
02:50I didn't really think about what he did in that film.
02:57That wasn't really something I ever thought about.
03:01I thought only about Mark Zuckerberg.
03:05So in the same way that when I played Roy Cohn, I didn't go back and look at James Woods.
03:11I didn't go back and look at Pacino.
03:14If anything, because the anxiety of influence might, you know, that might have an effect.
03:21And I think the goal is to own it and to find your version and to connect to your own
03:29inchoate instincts
03:31and let your intuition guide you.
03:33Is this a harder thing to do when you're playing somebody who's quote-unquote real
03:36as opposed to somebody who's made up by a screenwriter?
03:40Yeah, I think it's a different set of challenges.
03:43And in this case, I mean, I have to attempt to create a character or embody a character
03:55so with such belief and conviction that you might accept it
04:01and you might suspend your disbelief.
04:04You might forget about Jesse.
04:06You might even forget about what Mark looked like in 2019 in front of Congress.
04:12And so that's my only goal.
04:14And anything that doesn't serve that goal, I jettison.
04:17And as far as Aaron is concerned, Aaron is as great a writer as we have, as cinema has ever
04:26had, I think.
04:27So he's given me, you know, it's like the golden record.
04:33It's like it's something that is a near-perfect piece of text.
04:36Which is very rare.
04:38In a sense, the text is all you need.
04:42You need to prepare the life to meet the text.
04:47But the text will take you there.
04:49I think by now a lot of people are, to put it mildly, fed up with Mark Zuckerberg.
04:55In a way they weren't necessarily when they went to see...
04:58The first movie.
04:59The first movie.
05:00Sure.
05:01And by now he's at a different level of wealth and power and influence that was unimaginable even to him.
05:10And you reach out to him.
05:13You write him a letter.
05:14Is that right?
05:14I wrote him an email.
05:15And what did it say?
05:17And what were you looking for?
05:19I essentially said, you've probably heard that I'm going to be portraying you in this film or a character based
05:28on you in this film.
05:29And I just want you to know that I take this very seriously.
05:34That I'm trying to learn everything.
05:41And that I'm going to approach it with respect and veracity as much as possible.
05:50And what do you hear from him?
05:52Well, you know, the response, I don't feel that I can speak to that because it was private and I
06:00don't want to violate that.
06:01What was the spirit of the response?
06:03I think the spirit of the response was hedged but responsive.
06:15And I wouldn't say that he was grateful.
06:18I think if I were Mark, I would be rightly cautious and wary of another film being made given that
06:26there's a lot about the first film that is fictional.
06:29This is Aaron Sorkin's version.
06:32For sure.
06:32And you can hear it in the speech rhythms and the way that it's very Sorkinian.
06:37Yes.
06:38Even to the point where he parodies himself a couple of times and, you know, can we have the room?
06:44I think somebody says at some point in a kind of West Wingy.
06:47Right.
06:47A way of self-awareness.
06:49You know, I think one of the things that I was trying to understand was this transition into a wartime
06:56CEO, essentially.
06:58Somebody who's besieged and embattled and yet determined.
07:04Someone who, it is my belief, is idealistic and principled, if wrong.
07:12At the time the movie starts, you know, we've had 2016 election interference by state actors.
07:19We've had the Macedonian trolls misinformation campaign.
07:23We've had Rohingya violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar in 2014.
07:29You know, all of these things create this intensification of pressure on this person.
07:36This crucible of pressure contending with content moderation of hate speech, terrorist content, harmful content, child exploitation, election misinformation.
07:50All of these things under investigation by the FBI, the DOJ, the SEC, the FTC by 2019.
07:59And also by 2019, 100 billion pieces of information flowing across their platforms every day.
08:08So part of my job in understanding him and sort of fighting his fight is – and this is going
08:18to be an unpopular thing to say in this climate – is trying to have a kind of empathy, an
08:25empathetic understanding of this person's struggle.
08:28But the empathy is not a political empathy.
08:31It's an empathy of trying to imagine yourself as that person.
08:34Yes.
08:34Seeing the world as he might.
08:35Yes.
08:36It's a – I would say the empathy is a necessary and perhaps the vital component of this art form,
08:44which is to be in a sense impartial.
08:50I am representing him.
08:52You know, Aaron said that when he writes a character, it's as if that character is arguing to God why
09:01he should be admitted to heaven.
09:03And I think I would recuse myself from playing the role if I was going to inject my own subjective
09:14judgment or condemnation of a character.
09:17Did you change your view of Mark Zuckerberg when you started out as just a citizen who, like anybody, was
09:23reading about him, was watching him?
09:25Did the process of going so deep on him as a character and then playing him change your view of
09:33the human?
09:34Sure.
09:35How so?
09:35I mean when I try to put myself in these shoes and weigh, feel the weight of these incredibly complex
09:47frontline decisions that have no precedent in the history of humankind, weighing on the one hand free speech and on
09:59the other hand safety.
10:01Because ultimately every content moderation decision is about those things, voice versus harm.
10:08On the margins, those issues are incredibly complex.
10:13So that gave me a different kind of empathy for the person and people having to make those decisions and
10:24failing to make them perfectly.
10:26Now, I should say I'm not ambivalent about how bad short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops are on the mental
10:44health of our young people.
10:45I'm not ambivalent to those things.
10:47I'm not ambivalent to the heinous fallacies of Alex Jones or to Holocaust denialism being on some of those platforms.
10:56Just to be really clear about that, I think those things are unequivocally wrong.
11:01Well, you played Roy Cohn and I wonder – the big word here to me is sympathy, which is a
11:06larger – we use the word sympathy.
11:08I'm sending my sympathy as somebody dies.
11:10Sympathy is a much more interesting word and concept and it seems to be what you're after.
11:17To be – you use the word empathy.
11:18To be in sympathy with who this person is about.
11:23But when the person – when it's so hard to find the good in them, like Roy Cohn, maybe I'm
11:30getting it wrong.
11:33That seems like a really hard task for an actor.
11:37Well, you know, Roy Cohn was called by someone the pole star of human evil and Ken Oletta told me
11:47he was the most monstrous person he'd ever encountered.
11:50So, yes, that is hard.
11:52And I'm not sure looking for the good is the right way to frame it.
11:59What you're saying is not looking for the good but looking for how that person sees himself and the world
12:05is the important thing.
12:06Yeah.
12:06I mean I think you're trying to see through their eyes and you're trying to understand their struggle.
12:14Who's the model for you?
12:17Who's the actor that exemplifies both in process and result what you'd like to be?
12:25You had a Daniel Day-Lewis figure in your past.
12:28Sure.
12:29Yeah.
12:29I mean Daniel – you know, I worked for Daniel as his assistant.
12:33You were his assistant, yeah.
12:34Which was a profound and revelatory experience for me.
12:39And, of course, he's someone that so many of us have been so inspired by, his commitment, his resolve, his
12:51willingness to, you know, in his words, make a fool of himself, you know, to go out on a limb.
13:00But this – you know, Meryl is certainly somebody that we all feel that way about as well.
13:05Meryl Streep.
13:06Dustin Hoffman, you know, who recently said to me, I don't know how I did it.
13:14And you feel like you'll never be able to do it again each time.
13:17How much is your approach helpful to a director and your fellow castmates?
13:24How much does it throw them off?
13:26You're super involved in these things.
13:29When you did your own research on Roy Cohn for The Apprentice, for example, you ended up, you yourself, adding
13:33a scene to the movie that wasn't in the script that had to do with diamond cufflinks, if I remember.
13:39Oh, yeah.
13:40Yeah, yeah.
13:41Is that something that's appreciated by the people around you or how does this work?
13:48I mean –
13:49You're laughing.
13:50No, I mean, I think – I can't really speak to that.
13:57Of course, some people seem to have been – it is never my intention to interfere with anyone else's experience
14:11or anyone else's way of working.
14:14First, do no harm, right?
14:16Right.
14:16But commit to your fucking – to what you're doing and utterly.
14:21Meaning you get frustrated sometimes with other people who are not?
14:25No, just meaning that I'm just there to commit utterly to serving the material.
14:29Right.
14:30And so if some people feel that I'm taking it too seriously or it changes the molecules in the room
14:44in a way that makes something uncomfortable.
14:47I guess that's something that I don't feel that I need to apologize for because I believe and I think
14:57the directors that I work with all believe that it's in service of the material.
15:02And I personally think that a lot of the reactions to it are of a personal nature.
15:15That hurt.
15:17What do you mean?
15:18Well, let's talk about what we're talking about in this sense.
15:20So we met last year at the Telluride Film Festival.
15:24Yeah.
15:24I saw you and I really admire you and I'd seen you in any number of films.
15:30And I thought I should walk in the other direction because we had published a profile of you by Michael
15:37Shulman in 2021.
15:38That I read as something that was about a serious artist being not self-serious in the derisive sense, but
15:46serious.
15:48And yeah, there were people in it that, you know, poked fun at your method and because they did it
15:53a different way.
15:56And I read it in an entirely different way.
15:59I did not read this as a profile that was making fun of somebody above all or anything of the
16:05like.
16:05But I know that you were hurt by it, at least in the immediate aftermath of it, that you didn't
16:11like it and saw it as a betrayal of trust, I think is the phrase you used.
16:15These moments of what you, which I admired, your honesty in that piece and openness was, that's what was rare
16:28about it and startling.
16:32But you didn't feel that way, certainly not in the immediate aftermath.
16:36I would only say that what I shared, what I talked about as a betrayal of trust, I feel like,
16:43you know, it could have been met with, because I've had other different experiences with different journalists, it perhaps could
16:52have been met with more compassion.
16:54Uh, and, and, and that's what I would have wished for.
17:00But listen, you know, all's fair in love and war.
17:03So, so I think the thing about this film, this work, the work that I care most about, Roy Cohn,
17:13these are right on the fault line of, of everything that's going on in our world right now.
17:20And so if I take my job seriously, it is commensurate with the kind of subjects that I feel that
17:27I'm working on.
17:28You went on the, did a Super Bowl commercial to make fun of your own seriousness in the wake of
17:34that profile, a Dunkin' Donuts commercial, which was pretty hilarious.
17:40Why'd you do that?
17:42Well, really.
17:43Did you feel you had to take the air out of that imagery of self-seriousness?
17:47No, you know, to, to be honest, it's a, it's a less, uh, it was really that I was asked
17:53to do it.
17:54Ben Affleck asked me to do it.
17:56And, and the, the, the pitch of what it was, was not something that excited me.
18:01And then.
18:01So you rewrote it.
18:02And then I rewrote it and just, you know, had an image of, I think it's Marty Sheen in Apocalypse
18:07Now coming out of the, you know, coming out of that sludge.
18:10And I sort of had like a middle of the night image of somebody coming out of coffee beans.
18:16There's nothing, you know, it wasn't a, but enemy of the, the Ibsen play was a response to that profile
18:21for me because Ibsen had written ghosts, which he felt like was a deeply personal expression that was met with
18:31ridicule and scorn by people who he thought would meet it with, uh, understanding and approbation and, and enemy of
18:39the people, uh, which is, you know, uh, about someone attempting to.
18:45Tell the truth to a community who sees himself as a servant of the people, but is called instead an
18:51enemy of the people, right?
18:53You know, this ongoing question about like, how do other act, how does it make other actors feel?
19:00It feels along those lines of trying to make me into an enemy of the people when I strongly see
19:08my job as a servant of, not that you, that's what you're trying to, to do.
19:12I, in a million years, I wouldn't have read it like that.
19:15But.
19:16But I'm not you.
19:16But, um, but, you know, I think that what Aaron is doing, the social reckoning is about this, the big
19:26question of this movie, and I think a question that hangs over, you know, like the sword of Damocles over
19:35some of these CEOs is the question that was asked to Benjamin Franklin in 1787 outside the Constitutional Convention.
19:42You know, what, what have you given us, a republic if you can keep it, and I think that, you
19:48know, those are, that's what's at stake in this movie as Aaron sees it.
19:53Um, these issues of truth decay, of, of the denial of truth, you know, these things are so, um, they're
20:07so potent, and they're so important, that to me, it warrants just being completely all in to show up and
20:17give these things everything I can possibly give them.
20:21So, so, yeah, I, if I have a Polish voice for those seven months, um.
20:27Which is for another film, yeah.
20:29Which is for this Peter Morgan film, The Boys from Brazil, uh, uh, that's just, uh, you know, that's much
20:37ado about nothing.
20:38Meaning it's in service to something.
20:39Yeah, yeah.
20:40You were in a film about the Chicago Seven.
20:43Yeah.
20:43And you played Jerry Rubin, who was the great comedian radical of that group.
20:47Yeah.
20:48Um, I remember as a kid reading his classic book, Do It.
20:52Yeah, great book.
20:53And at one point, you wanted Aaron Sorkin to spray you with tear gas, you know, for the verisimilitude of
21:03what was happening at this demonstration.
21:05And Aaron Sorkin took your suggestion in his telling, but he decided that it might hurt a lot of people.
21:12And, but it was, it was an example of your, you know, some would call it craziness.
21:18And others would call it devotion to the, to the craft or the need for some sense of, um, realism.
21:25Sure.
21:26Well, I just, you know.
21:27What is that all about?
21:28I want to kind of demythologize that a little bit.
21:30Go ahead.
21:31Go ahead.
21:32You know, first of all, you're, what you're alluding to is the, is the, what happened in Grant Park, uh,
21:38between the Chicago police and the, and the yippies and everyone.
21:42Democratic convention of 68.
21:43Yeah.
21:43Everyone who was protesting the war in Vietnam, um, and the democratic convention.
21:48And, you know, if you watch Haskell Wexler's incredible documentary medium, cool, you're, you're right in there and you feel,
21:55you feel this sort of authoritarian police state and the incredible, uh, violence that was happening.
22:02So I think what I want to do is capture, uh, what was at stake and what was happening and
22:10what those people were putting themselves through, what they were putting on the line.
22:13Now, what I wanted to do, I should, I want to be very clear, involved no one else and would
22:20have involved no one else.
22:21It was, you know, for the purpose of a closeup and to have the physiological effects of what that would
22:26be.
22:26Of, of your eyes burning.
22:28So that I, you know, I don't really, you know, the goal in a sense, you know, Brando put himself
22:34in a bathtub of ice once to, to get a certain effect of numbness.
22:39You, you don't want to act is the point.
22:41You don't ever want to act.
22:42You, I, I had seen you as we all had in smaller roles, but then succession came along and you
22:50play this incredibly complex, sad, damaged, intelligent, unaware, just an incredibly complicated character.
23:03But this one is neither entirely made up nor based in a very clear way on a character like Roy
23:13Cohen or Mark Zuckerberg.
23:18When you're looking at it through the lens of the Murdochs, which is the most obvious model, is it there
23:25for you just to pick and choose from characteristics?
23:27How did you create the character of Kendall Roy in concert with your colleagues?
23:32Yeah, you're, you, I think you're like a detective and you're just looking for clues.
23:36So you read everything.
23:38Again, it's this, you know, each time it's different and each, you know, you, you, you really kind of start
23:43from nothing every time.
23:46But this time around you don't contact James Murdoch or anything?
23:48No, because also I don't think it was certainly that family along with a lot of other families are in
23:57the, are in the genome of what Jesse wrote.
24:00But it's not a, it's not a one-to-one, it's, it's not, I would say, about them.
24:06Have you ever indulged in therapy and if so, is it helpful in this, um, work?
24:14I mean, sure, I've, I've, I've, I've had therapy.
24:18I've read a lot about psychology.
24:21I'm married to a psychiatrist.
24:24Um, is it helpful in this work?
24:28Not really.
24:31Because, I mean, in, in so far as it gives you a deeper understanding,
24:36an understanding of human psychology, sure.
24:39But an understanding of yourself and your resources.
24:42I'm not sure, I'm not sure yourself, you know, what I'm trying to do is disappear into a role.
24:52That's what my heroes did.
24:54That's what, when you see Ben Kingsley play Simon Riesenthal in The Murderers Among Us,
24:59and then you see him play Adolf Eichmann, you know, a few years ago.
25:03Like, I don't see the guy anymore.
25:06I just see those characters.
25:08Do you care how he will react to this film, how Mark Zuckerberg will encounter this film?
25:16Uh, I do, yeah.
25:17You do?
25:18Yeah.
25:19What reaction would disappoint you or upset you?
25:22I mean, I think my hope is that the film is a dialectic, uh, uh, rather than a polemic, rather
25:30than, there's a kind of trend, generally, of like, it's all Facebook's fault.
25:37Like, all of it, everything.
25:40Mm-hmm.
25:40Now-
25:41Including the weather.
25:42Yeah, just, it's all their, it's all their fault.
25:46And I don't think that that is a, you know, when we talk about truth decay and the deterioration of
25:52civil discourse,
25:54our storytelling plays a really important role in that.
26:00So, I personally, and it's why I reached out to Mark and my feelings as we were doing it, because
26:06I was defending him a lot when we were making the film, to my director.
26:10What were you defending to Aaron Sorkin, specifically?
26:13Just arguing for Mark's point of view, arguing for-
26:18Because you thought he was right, or you thought that's how he would see the world?
26:22That's how he would see the world.
26:24It's a big difference.
26:24Yeah, I mean, I sent Aaron emails as Mark sometimes at night.
26:28I understand.
26:29But I'm not, I've taken Jeremy out of this at that point, which I know sounds crazy, but it's really
26:36not.
26:37It's about sort of negative space.
26:39You want to create room for, to enter into this other person's experience.
26:46Is there an afterlife to it?
26:47You finish your role, it's wrapped, it's ready to air.
26:52Does it still live inside you, or is it gone?
26:55I think I'm changed by some of these things.
26:58You know, they take you places.
27:03Experientially.
27:04I always answer with other people's words, because they're better than mine.
27:08So I'll say, there's a poem that I really love by Stanley Kunitz that you might know, called The Layers.
27:16And he writes,
27:17I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was,
27:23though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
27:28Jeremy Strong, thank you.
27:30Thanks, David.