Aaron Sorkin didn’t want to write another film about Mark Zuckerberg. He’d walked away from the success of “The Social Network,” thinking the Facebook founder/CEO had been a relatively good sport, admiring his $100 million donation to the Newark public education system in response to the backlash caused by Sorkin’s Oscar-winning screenplay.
Sorkin’s point of view changed dramatically after reading books by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), and former Zuckerberg insider Roger McNamee, all of which opened his eyes to how Facebook knowingly fostered hyper-political polarization for its own financial gain.
“I didn’t want to jump up and down on him again with another movie,” Sorkin said on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. “I don’t feel that way anymore. It’s not about jumping up and down on Mark, it’s about Roger McNamee was right: It’s really dangerous what’s going on.”
That Sorkin name-checks McNamee is significant. Haugen and Horwitz would become “The Social Reckoning‘s” protagonists; McNamee would become its conscience and the inspiration for Bill Burr’s fictional character in the film.
“Roger McNamee is a Silicon Valley VC,” Sorkin said. “He was an early investor in Facebook and became a kind of a consigliere to Mark in the few years right after ‘The Social Network’ takes place, and then the two of them had a falling out.”
The falling out came from McNamee not biting his tongue about the direction Zuckerberg was taking the company. After Zuckerberg froze him out, McNamee wrote “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe,” which led Sorkin to meet with him several times.
Since “The West Wing,” Sorkin’s magic formula as a writer has been simple: have two very smart people, on opposite ends of an issue, argue. In “The Social Reckoning,” one narrative thread running through the timeline-jumping script is an under-siege Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) in his war room preparing for his upcoming congressional testimony. Sorkin’s problem was that, in reality, at this point in Facebook’s history, the powerful CEO had pushed out all the Roger McNamees, having suppressed dissent within the company.
Sorkin’s solution was the fictional character Charlie Garrigan (Burr), whom Sorkin admitted was directly inspired by McNamee, and the fantasy that Zuckerberg had reached such a crisis point that he was forced to let a McNamee-like character back in to counsel him. For Burr, that his character, in reality, had been replaced by corporate lackeys explains so much of what’s wrong with the world.
“That is the problem with all of that stuff. I think it’s the problem with the corporate world. It’s the problem with politics,” Burr said in an interview with IndieWire. “There’s always that moment in all business where it’s like, ‘Will you pour it in the water supply?’ And all the people go, ‘No, I would never do that. I wouldn’t do that to my own countrymen, forget about fellow human beings.’ Yeah. And then there’s always one person, ‘I’ll do it,’ and they’re the ones that move up.”
It’s what Burr enjoys about stand-up: No matter how successful and wealthy he’s become in recent years, the audience (especially in clubs, when he’s working out new material) snaps him back to reality.
“I had a tough set the other night,” Burr said, making the counter-analogy to Zuckerberg’s isolation. “Somebody came up to me and was just like, ‘Wow, man, I haven’t seen you struggle like that in a while.’ And I was just like, ‘Dude, it never ends.’ And that’s a really good thing, you take a beating up there every once in a while.”
It’s also what Burr enjoyed about the scenario Sorkin had created: The theater-like setting of the war room (designed to mirror the spotlight of the hearings) became the perfect stage for his character’s debate with Zuckerberg.
“As a comedian, what I liked was you had this whole group of people on one side of the room that were getting paid by this guy, so they had a certain amount of parameters that they could stay in, and I don’t care. I’m not trying to get a job with this guy. I also knew this guy when he wasn’t anybody. So I don’t hold him [in this high regard], he’s just Mark,” Burr said.
Casting Bill Burr — the stand-up, who in recent years has repeatedly gone viral for speaking hard truths right to people’s face with all the bluntness of his blue-collar Boston roots — was a whole other layer of wish fulfillment for Sorkin. “I love the casting Bill because getting Bill Burr [up against] Mark Zuckerberg was interesting, but even more once Jeremy Strong was cast.”
On the podcast, “The Social Reckoning” writer/director went into detail about the lengths Strong went to to embody Zuckerberg and how he stayed in character, capturing the Facebook founder’s implacable, master-of-the-universe mindset, which made Burr the ideal sparring partner.
“It became important to cast someone as Charlie that Jeremy wasn’t just going to blow off the screen. It’s not like any old member of SAG can stand toe-to-toe with him in these scenes. And I knew that Bill would not get blown off the screen by anyone,” Sorkin said. “Moreover, I thought deep down Jeremy Strong will have this resentment that this standup thinks he can be on a screen with me, and Bill Burr will have this resentment of, ‘Who does this method kid think he is? I’m from Boston, for God’s sake. I’m Bill Burr. I sell out the Garden,’ and that that will find its way into these scenes.”
Burr pivoted the discussion away from Strong staying in character (“It’s acting, it’s not real. It’s literally they say ‘action,’ I say what I say and then they say what they say”), and downplayed the importance of how actors behave in between setups. Instead, Burr latched onto the backstory between his and Strong’s characters, which he said lay beneath every line of dialogue.
“My favorite thing was the failed relationship underneath it, the hurt, and the betrayal,” Burr said. “I wasn’t under his thumb, and I also was not afraid of him. If anything, I had to fight enjoying irritating him. Like when he screams, ‘Enough!,’ I’m like, ‘Oh, good, I wound him up there.’ It was like seeing a powerful guy losing his shit because he doesn’t have any power. This person doesn’t care about his power.”
Burr never met McNamee, nor read his book, nor thinks of his character as being based on any one person, but rather an “amalgamation due to legal stuff.” Burr’s North Star in playing Charlie was tapping into a dilemma that is also the underpinning of much of his stand-up act: grappling with his own worst instincts and pettiness.
“I bet my character felt when I left Facebook that, ‘You’re going to see what I brought to this company,’ and then not only did [Facebook] not dip a little, but it went to the stratosphere. I was playing that that probably bruised my professional ego,” Burr said. “I wanted to say a bunch of things to him, but I can’t because I have a goal [to get Zuckerberg to make changes to the platform]. The goal is bigger than my petty stuff with this guy, so that was really fun to play. I don’t know about you, but one of the hardest things about being an adult is being the bigger person, because it’s the right thing to do, but there’s no satisfaction. Nothing feels better in the moment than being petty.”
To hear Aaron Sorkin’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also watch the full interview on YouTube.
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