Playing a living billionaire who runs a trillion-dollar company — and keeps a legal department to match — is a different assignment than inhabiting the dead or the invented. The subject can watch. He can object. He can, in theory, write back. Jeremy Strong seems to have grasped that from the moment he signed on to play Mark Zuckerberg, because before the cameras rolled he did something few actors would risk: he contacted the man himself.

As Deadline relayed from a new GQ interview, Strong emailed the Meta founder to set the terms of his approach. “Just to say that I take this responsibility very seriously, and the veracity of it seriously, and I’m approaching it with respect,” the actor recalled writing. Zuckerberg, he confirmed, wrote back — though Strong declined to reveal what the reply said, guarding the exchange as closely as the film guards its whistleblower.

The outreach is of a piece with Strong’s near-pathological immersion, the same total-submersion method that powered his Kendall Roy on Succession and his Roy Cohn in The Apprentice. He has called Zuckerberg “the mother lode,” hoovering up podcasts, magazine profiles and tech-summit talks, watching footage of the CEO’s congressional testimony, in his words, “until my eyes fell out of my head.” He even signed up for Facebook to scroll Zuckerberg’s posts from the beginning — an actor joining the platform to study the man who built it.

What raises the temperature is the project itself. The Social Reckoning reunites Aaron Sorkin with the story he mythologized in 2010’s The Social Network, except this time Sorkin directs as well as writes, and the founder’s-rise fable has curdled into a whistleblower thriller. Strong inherits Zuckerberg from Jesse Eisenberg — no longer the ambitious Harvard sophomore but the embattled chief executive of a company under oath. Mikey Madison plays engineer-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen and Jeremy Allen White the Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, the pair who dragged Facebook’s own research into daylight.

That is the needle Strong is threading: humanizing a man his own movie means to indict, and doing it while that man is alive to read the reviews. Sony releases the film — a companion piece to the original, built from the 2021 “Facebook Files” reporting — on October 9.

There is a vertiginous loop buried in the courtesy of that email. An actor joins Facebook to become Zuckerberg, writes to Zuckerberg to promise he’ll be fair, then hands himself to a script arguing the company’s gravest sin was everything it already knew.

Tags: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeremy Strong, Aaron Sorkin, The Social Reckoning