A studio can pay to bring an original star back for a sequel, but it cannot pay to make that star want the role. Aaron Sorkin, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Social Network, has now explained how he learned that lesson on The Social Reckoning, his follow-up about Facebook, and why Jesse Eisenberg, whose Mark Zuckerberg defined the first film, turned down the chance to play the Meta chief again.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, in comments picked up by Deadline, Sorkin said “it never occurred” to him that Eisenberg would say no. He was a couple of pages from finishing the script when he ran into the actor, told him something was coming his way and got a smile and a nod in return. The studio’s offer did not tip the balance. “Money does not motivate Jesse. It’s infuriating,” Sorkin said. “If anything, money is a disincentive for him. It’s admirable. He’s very concerned about raising his kids with too much money.”

Sorkin did not give up quickly. He spent a three-day weekend trying to change Eisenberg’s mind and, by his own account, prepared for those talks in a way he says he never prepares for a film: with a written outline. “It was arguments for why he should do it,” he said, among them the case that “we already know you’re gonna be great because you were already once.” The script was not the obstacle. “He just doesn’t like being conflated with Mark Zuckerberg anymore,” Sorkin said, adding that Eisenberg dislikes resembling the tech billionaire physically and that the role is probably what he is most known for.

The refusal carries weight because of what the original did for Eisenberg. David Fincher’s The Social Network earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination while Sorkin won for Adapted Screenplay. Since then Eisenberg has built a second career behind the camera, collecting a screenplay nomination for A Real Pain, which he wrote, directed and starred in.

Sorkin, who is directing this time as well as writing, turned instead to Jeremy Strong, the Succession star who earned his own Oscar nomination for playing Roy Cohn in The Apprentice. The new film leaves Facebook’s founding behind for the 2021 leak of internal documents that exposed the harm the platform caused. Mikey Madison plays whistleblower Frances Haugen, who takes the company’s secrets to Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, played by Jeremy Allen White. Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku, Billy Magnussen and Betty Gilpin also star.

Strong was cast as Zuckerberg in September 2025, after the weekend of talks with Eisenberg had come to nothing. The Sony Pictures release held a gala screening in London on September 29 and opens in US theaters on October 9.

The outline, the only one Sorkin says he has ever written himself, now belongs to the film’s backstory: a writer famous for winning arguments on the page lost the one he scripted for real, to an actor worried about leaving his children too much money.

Tags: casting, Jeremy Strong, Aaron Sorkin, Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network, The Social Reckoning