Jeremy Strong is sort of becoming the guy we just expect to play real-life figures. Most recently was Roy Cohn in The Apprentice and soon we’ll see him as Bruce Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau in Deliver Me from Nowhere. And while some of Jeremy Strong’s roles have been tackled by notable names before (Cohn was played by Al Pacino in Angels in America, Parkland’s Lee Harvey Oswald by Gary Oldman in JFK), there’s no more recognizable one than Mark Zuckerberg. But that’s who he is taking on next for the follow-up to David Fincher’s The Social Network.
Zuckerberg was first played by Jesse Eisenberg in the 2010 film, earning major acclaim and going on to earn his first Oscar nomination (and so far only in an acting category). But for Jeremy Strong, he will be focusing on his own approach, saying he hasn’t even contacted Eisenberg about the Facebook founder. As he bluntly told The Hollywood Reporter, “I think that has nothing to do with what I’m going to do.”
That’s definitely a fair point, as the quasi-sequel, officially titled The Social Reckoning, takes place quite a bit later and so Jeremy Strong would be a sort of Mark Zuckerberg 2.0 (and it will be plenty of fun to compare the performances). Here is the official plot of the movie: “A companion piece to the hit film, The Social Network, Sorkin’s original screenplay tells the true story of how Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a young Facebook engineer, enlists the help of Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), a Wall Street Journal reporter, to go on a dangerous journey that ends up blowing the whistle on the social network’s most guarded secrets.”
While Jeremy Strong might not have much to say about Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg, he does have a grasp on the character and has nothing but praise for writer Aaron Sorkin, having previously worked with him on Molly’s Game and The Trial of the Chicago 7 (playing another real-life figure, counterculture icon Jerry Rubin). “It’s one of the great scripts I’ve ever read. It speaks to our time, it touches the third rail of everything happening in our world. It’s a great character — fascinating, complex — and I’m approaching it with great care and empathy and objectivity.”
The Social Reckoning is currently slated for October 9th, 2026.
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