“It feels incredibly fraught,” he says, “to talk about the movie, to talk about Mark and being the person who is playing Mark and representing Mark in a sense to the world and to posterity; I feel an enormous sense of weight and responsibility. And listen, my job is to understand and defend his point of view and fight his fight.”

Plus—and Strong says this was important—Zuckerberg is also a real person, a human being with children. They have been in the same room only once—Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are cofounders of the Breakthrough Prize, a kind of Oscars for science, and they were at the ceremony last year, when Strong presented an award to the University of Washington biochemist David Baker. They didn’t meet that day, and they still haven’t. But when Strong took on *Social Reckoning*, he reached out to his subject.

**“I wrote to him—I’m probably going to give Sony an aneurysm—I sent him an email,” Strong says. “Just to say that I take this responsibility very seriously, and the veracity of it seriously, and I’m approaching it with respect.”**

He won’t speak to Zuckerberg’s response, but confirms that Zuckerberg wrote him back. He says if Zuckerberg had invited him to hang out at Meta’s offices, he probably wouldn’t have accepted. He’s played real people before—Jon Landau, Roy Cohn, Jerry Rubin, even Lee Harvey Oswald—and he’s done his share of in-person research, but he finds it easier to do the job from an objective distance, by reading and watching.

Eisenberg’s “Mark,” from *The Social Network*, while compellingly caustic, is basically a fictional creation who only circumstantially resembles the Zuckerberg we’ve since come to know. Like Kendall Roy, whose father-wound made him emotionally legible despite his wealth and privilege, the character has a clean and comprehensible origin story—he invents a website that will reshape the world, toppling dictatorships and democracies alike, because Rooney Mara dumps him for being an asshole and there’s nothing he can do to change her mind.

“But, of course, he was already with Priscilla at the time,” Strong notes. He didn’t want to play a fictional character in a Mark Zuckerberg–type situation. “I wanted to play *Mark Zuckerberg,*” he says.

**And from a research perspective, Strong says, Zuckerberg was “the mother lode.” He wanted to absorb everything he could—podcasts, magazine interviews, tech-summit talks, and ideas-festival conversations. He watched footage of Zuckerberg testifying before Congress “until my eyes fell out of my head,” trying to internalize it. He doesn’t do social media, but he signed up for a Facebook account to read through Zuckerberg’s posts from the beginning, a longitudinal record of Zuckerberg’s evolution, in the gap between the two films, into a “wartime CEO.”**

Even after all that preparation, Strong says, he found himself experiencing “a total crisis of faith,” worried that his performance would read as nothing more than Jeremy Strong in a hoodie, like some cheap-shot sketch-comedy impersonation.

**These days he’s less worried about how it’ll be received. Someone showed him the Oscar/Razzie tweet, and he took it as a compliment. “I thought that was the greatest endorsement,” Strong says. “Because to me, it was like—listen, I’ll be sad if I win a Razzie, but that’s the place you want to be. That’s the wager you have to make. To me, that means,** ***Okay, I put it on the line enough.*****”**

Jeremy Strong discusses preparing for the role of Mark Zuckerberg in 'The Social Reckoning' — watching countless hours of footage of Zuckerberg testifying before Congress, signing up for Facebook to see Zuckerberg's entire post history from start to finish, learning his speech patterns & mannerisms