Key Points
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Aaron Sorkin says he spent three days trying to convince Jesse Eisenberg to return as Mark Zuckerberg for The Social Reckoning.
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None of his arguments, including a hefty payday, motivated the actor, who earned an Oscar nomination for playing the Facebook founder in 2010’s The Social Network.
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“Money does not motivate Jesse,” Sorkin tells EW. “It’s infuriating.”
A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what else isn’t cool? A billion dollars — at least
Though he earned an Oscar nomination for playing Mark Zuckerberg in 2010’s The Social Network, the actor declined to return to the role in this year’s follow-up, The Social Reckoning, despite overtures from screenwriter and director Aaron Sorkin, who says promises of a sizable payday were far from persuasive.
“I knew what the studio was offering him to do it, but money does not motivate Jesse. It’s infuriating,” Sorkin tells Entertainment Weeklywith a laugh. “If anything, money is a disincentive for him. It’s admirable. He’s very concerned about raising his kids with too much money.”
When it became clear that personal wealth wouldn’t motivate the star, Sorkin says he “wrote a list of all the things he could” do with the money, like “he could produce X number of Broadway plays of his own.” Still, Eisenberg turned him down.
The filmmaker, who won an Oscar for writing the first film, didn’t tell Eisenberg or anybody except the few people closest to him that he was working on the script for the new movie. When he was “just a couple of pages from being done,” he ran into the actor at a party “and said, ‘I’m gonna be sending you something in a couple of weeks.’ And he smiled and nodded, and I sent it to him. It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t wanna do it.”
Over a three-day weekend, Sorkin did everything he could to convince Eisenberg to change his mind. “This is the only time I’ve written myself an outline. I don’t do it for the movies, but I did it for my conversations with Jesse,” he says. “It was arguments for why he should do it. They included, ‘We already know you’re gonna be great because you were already once.’ You know, ‘Here are the great moments that you’re gonna get to play in the movie.’ And I laid it out for him.”
Asked if he ever felt that he was close to convincing Eisenberg to take the job, he says, “I do remember Jesse saying at one point during the third or fourth back and forth, ‘You have come closer to changing my mind than I thought you were going to.’ So I was pleased about that.”
While Sorkin notes that Eisenberg liked the script, he says the actor had a straightforward reason for passing. “He just doesn’t like being conflated with Mark Zuckerberg anymore,” the director explains. “He doesn’t like that he kinda resembles the guy physically; that role is probably what he’s most known for.”
Eisenberg said as much during a discussion at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in July, telling the audience, “I don’t want to be associated with [Zuckerberg] anymore because I don’t really like the comparison.” At the same event, he also said he was terrified of social media and that the Facebook founder “is not a person who cares about people.”
Described as “a companion piece” to The Social Network,The Social Reckoning takes place 16 years later, with Successionstar Jeremy Strong stepping in to play the controversial billionaire.
“Jeremy’s performance in the movie is fantastic,” Sorkin says. “It’s not the same character. It’s the same character 16 years older. And this company, which started as a way to keep in touch with their friends in high school and to meet girls in college, was now something very, very different. And by the end of the movie, we see what it can be responsible for.”
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Based on the events behind The Wall Street Journal‘s bombshell 2021 exposé “The Facebook Files,” the film also stars Jeremy Allen White as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jeff Horwitz, who broke the story based on a trove of internal documents leaked by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, played by Mikey Madison. The report exposed Facebook’s role in amplifying extremism and political polarization, prompting congressional hearings and further calls for regulation.
The Social Reckoninghits theaters on Oct. 9.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
