Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter who made talk the action, goes back to Facebook

Aaron Sorkin

Photo: Dominick D / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 9, 1961 Manhattan, New York City, USA
Occupation	Screenwriter and film director
Known for	The Social Network, A Few Good Men, The American President
Awards	Academy Award · BAFTA · Golden Globe · 2 Emmy

Aaron Sorkin built a career on the idea that people talking in a room can be as gripping as a car chase. His characters argue in corridors, interrupt each other and win by being faster with a sentence. Hollywood paid him for that conviction, then gave him an Oscar for it, and eventually let him direct. This week he returns to the story that made his screen reputation, the founding of Facebook, but from the opposite end. Where his first version followed an awkward student building a company, the new one follows the engineer who walked out with its internal documents.

The film is The Social Reckoning, which he wrote, directed and co-produced, and it lands in cinemas just as a Broadway revival of the play that started everything begins previews at Lincoln Center. Few writers get to revisit both ends of their own career in the same fortnight. Sorkin is using the moment to argue with his younger self.

He was born in Manhattan and raised in Scarsdale, a commuter suburb north of New York City, by a copyright lawyer and a schoolteacher. He studied musical theatre at Syracuse University, graduating in 1983 with the plan of becoming an actor. The acting did not take. He paid the rent with odd jobs and began writing plays at night.

The breakthrough came from the stage. A Few Good Men, a courtroom drama about two Marines accused of killing a fellow Marine at Guantanamo Bay, opened on Broadway in 1989 while Sorkin was still in his twenties. Rob Reiner turned it into a film in 1992 with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, and Nicholson’s courtroom explosion became one of the most quoted lines of the decade. Reiner then directed Sorkin’s script for The American President in 1995, a romantic comedy set inside the White House that turned out to be a rehearsal for his most famous work.

Television gave him the room to write at the length he preferred. After the newsroom comedy Sports Night, he created The West Wing for NBC in 1999, with Martin Sheen as a fictional president and a staff who conducted policy debates while walking at speed. The series won the Emmy for best drama four years running, and Sorkin wrote or co-wrote nearly every episode of its first four seasons before leaving in 2003. His follow-up, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, was cancelled after a single season.

The second film career was stronger than the first. After Mike Nichols directed his Charlie Wilson’s War with Tom Hanks, Sorkin adapted Ben Mezrich’s account of Facebook’s origins for David Fincher. The Social Network won him the Academy Award and the BAFTA for adapted screenplay and turned the founding of a website into something close to a tragedy. Moneyball, written with Steven Zaillian for Bennett Miller and Brad Pitt, earned a second Oscar nomination. Steve Jobs, directed by Danny Boyle with Michael Fassbender, won him a Golden Globe for a screenplay built in three acts around three product launches.

He then took the camera himself. Molly’s Game, with Jessica Chastain as the woman who ran high-stakes poker games for celebrities, brought another adapted-screenplay nomination. The Trial of the Chicago 7, released by Netflix with Sacha Baron Cohen and Eddie Redmayne, won the Golden Globe for screenplay and was nominated for best picture. Being the Ricardos, with Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz, followed for Amazon.

The case against Sorkin has been made for as long as he has been famous, and it has not changed much. Critics of The Newsroom, his HBO drama about a cable news anchor played by Jeff Daniels, argued that its women existed mainly to be corrected by its men and that its characters delivered lectures rather than lines. Viewers of his series have catalogued how often he reuses his own phrases, plot turns and even speeches. The deeper objection concerns truth. Mark Zuckerberg said publicly that The Social Network made up much of what it showed, and Sorkin has never pretended otherwise, defending dramatic licence over documentary accuracy. A film about a whistleblower who exposed what a company knew is a riskier place to take that licence, and the comparison is unavoidable.

The Social Reckoning dramatises how Frances Haugen, played by Mikey Madison, worked with Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, played by Jeremy Allen White, on the reporting that became known as the Facebook Files. Jeremy Strong takes over as Zuckerberg. Sorkin has said that Jesse Eisenberg declined to return because he “did not want to be conflated with Mark Zuckerberg anymore.” Shot in Vancouver at the end of 2025 with Jeff Cronenweth, the cinematographer of the 2010 film, and with a score by Alexandre Desplat, it had its world premiere at the Curzon Mayfair in London on September 29.

Sorkin’s private life has been public mostly when he chose to make it so. He married Julia Bingham, a lawyer, in 1996, and they divorced in 2005; they have a daughter, Roxy. He has spoken about his drug addiction, which became public after an arrest at Burbank airport in 2001 and ended in a court-ordered treatment programme. In November 2022 he had a stroke caused by high blood pressure while rewriting the book for the Lincoln Center revival of Camelot, and he went public with it months later to persuade others to stop smoking, as he had.

His stage work never stopped running in parallel with the films. His adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, with Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch, opened on Broadway in 2018, and Camelot followed in 2023. Now A Few Good Men returns to the Vivian Beaumont Theater under director Michael Arden, with Tom Blyth as the young Navy lawyer and Bradley Whitford, a member of the original 1989 cast and later a West Wing regular, as the colonel.

The Social Reckoning opens in American cinemas on October 9, and A Few Good Men officially opens on Broadway on October 29. By the end of the month Sorkin will have the oldest and the newest of his arguments running at the same time in New York, and the reviews of both will tell him whether audiences still want to hear him talk.