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Even when Jeremy Strong has taken on modest roles (“The Big Short”; “Lincoln”; “Zero Dark Thirty”; “Molly’s Game”), or found himself in a misfire project like Guy Ritchie’s “The Gentlemen,” he has invariably been the most compelling presence on the screen. As Kendall Roy in “Succession,” Strong teased out every ounce of the script’s dark comic potential. A tragic fool, a spoiled and deluded soul, Strong’s Kendall is never a cartoon. With that sustained and evolving performance, Strong joined the ranks of his acting heroes Daniel Day-Lewis, Al Pacino, and Dustin Hoffman.

In the wake of his demonic portrayal of Roy Cohn in “The Apprentice,” Strong accepted Aaron Sorkin’s offer to play Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Reckoning,” which is opening next week. In 2010, Jesse Eisenberg had played the young Zuckerberg in “The Social Network” with a kind of glassy-eyed, puerile menace; Strong infuses his Zuckerberg with all the ramrod posture and cracked certitude of the Meta overlord as his power accumulates.

A confession: I approached this interview with Strong for The New Yorker Radio Hour with some apprehension. In 2021, my colleague Michael Schulman wrote a brilliant Profile of Strong that described at length the actor’s anything-but-casual approach. It also quoted Brian Cox and Kieran Culkin making cracks about Strong’s unapologetically deliberate methods, which they found irritating and self-serious. Strong was wounded. Sorkin wrote an open letter calling the piece a “distorted picture of Jeremy that asks us to roll our eyes at his acting process.” He added: “Jeremy’s not a nut.” Jessica Chastain and Adam McKay also hustled to his defense. Strong later called the article a “profound betrayal of trust” and then starred in a self-parodying Dunkin’ Super Bowl commercial and a Broadway adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People,” each a form of reply to the piece.

In the studio, we discussed how he wished the Profile had treated his work, how he approaches playing characters who are bad people, why he doesn’t mind creating friction on set, and how playing a role changes him as a person. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.

In “The Social Reckoning,” the narrative unspools in the beginning, and it’s quite a while until we see you. And then, suddenly, we encounter you as Mark Zuckerberg. You hadn’t even opened your mouth, and I was thrown back in my chair. Just the physicality of you, your posture, your physical bearing—which then, of course, interacts with my memory of him testifying in Congress and all this kind of thing. There’s a certain kind of magic that’s already happened without you having opened your mouth. I want to know what goes into that.

Well, first of all, that means the absolute world to me, coming from you. Thank you.

My task is to surround the subject as completely as possible—leave no stone unturned—in an investigative mission to learn everything about them, both intellectually and viscerally. And the visceral part is more important because it’s ultimately a non-intellectual, unconscious process. I’m not thinking about my posture, how I hold my mouth or jawline. I’m not thinking about the voice. By the time you walk onto a set, all of that—and if it hasn’t, you’re in trouble—has to have become second skin.

So a lot of your job is internalizing a massive amount of information so that it is absorbed and ingested and becomes your second skin. In this case, I was creating for myself a sort of longitudinal record of Mark’s evolution starting from around 2010, because my interest is understanding the character’s struggle, and understanding the dramatic circumstances that he finds himself in.

Another aspect here is that there was another performance of Mark Zuckerberg, as a younger man, by Jesse Eisenberg, in an earlier film written by your director, Aaron Sorkin. I’d love to know what role that plays, and what role Sorkin plays—or does he leave creating the character entirely to you?

I love the first movie, and I think Jesse’s a great actor. But I didn’t really think about what he did in that film. I thought only about Mark Zuckerberg—in the same way that when I played Roy Cohn, I didn’t go back and look at James Woods. I didn’t go back and look at Pacino, if anything, because the anxiety of influence might have had an effect. And I think the goal is to own it, to find your version, and to connect to your own inchoate instincts and let your intuition guide you.

Is this a harder thing to do when you’re playing somebody who’s “real” as opposed to somebody who’s made up by a screenwriter?

Yeah, I think it’s a different set of challenges. And in this case I had to attempt to embody a character with such belief and conviction that you might accept it and suspend your disbelief. You might forget about Jesse, you might even forget about what Mark looked like in 2019 in front of Congress. That was my only goal. And anything that didn’t serve that goal, I jettisoned.

As far as Aaron is concerned, Aaron is as great a writer as cinema has ever had, I think. So he’s given me—it’s like the golden record—it’s like a near-perfect piece of text, which is very rare. In a sense, the text is all you need. You need to prepare the life to meet the text, but the text will take you there.

I think by now, a lot of people are, to put it mildly, fed up with Mark Zuckerberg in a way they weren’t necessarily when they went to see “The Social Network.” And by now he’s at a level of wealth, power, and influence that was unimaginable even to him. And you reached out to him—you wrote him a letter, is that right?

I wrote him an e-mail.

What did it say, and what were you looking for?

I essentially said, “You’ve probably heard that I’m going to be portraying you in this film, or a character based on you. And I just want you to know that I take this very seriously, that I’m trying to learn everything, and that I’m going to approach it with respect and veracity as much as possible.”

And what did you hear from him?

I don’t feel that I can speak to that because the response was private, and I don’t want to violate that.

What was the spirit of the response?

I think the spirit of the response was hedged, but responsive. I wouldn’t say that he was grateful. I think if I were Mark, I would be rightly cautious and wary of another film being made, given that there’s a lot about the first film that is fictional. This is Aaron Sorkin’s version.

For sure. And you can hear it in the speech—it’s very Sorkinian. Even to the point where he parodies himself a couple of times. “Can we have the room?,” I think somebody says at some point, in a kind of West Wing-y way.

I think one of the things that I was trying to understand was his transition into a wartime C.E.O., essentially—somebody who’s besieged and embattled and yet determined. Someone who, it is my belief, is idealistic and principled, if wrong.

At the time the movie starts, we’ve had 2016 election interference by state actors. We’ve had the Macedonian trolls misinformation campaign. We’ve had violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, in 2014. All of these things create this intensification of pressure on this person, this crucible of pressure, contending with content moderation of hate speech, terrorist content, harmful content, child exploitation, election misinformation—all of these things. They’re under investigation by the F.B.I., the D.O.J., the S.E.C., the F.T.C., by 2019. And also, by 2019, a hundred billion pieces of information are flowing across their platforms every day.

So, part of my job in understanding him and sort of fighting his fight is—and this is going to be an unpopular thing to say in this climate—trying to have empathy, an empathetic understanding of this person’s struggle.

But the empathy is not a political empathy. It’s an empathy of trying to imagine yourself as that person, seeing the world as he might.

Yes. I would say empathy is necessary, and perhaps the vital component of this art form, which is to be, in a sense, impartial. I am representing him. Aaron said that when he writes a character, it’s as if that character is arguing to God why he should be admitted to heaven. And I think I would recuse myself from playing the role if I was going to inject my own subjective judgment or condemnation of a character.

Did the process of going so deep on Mark Zuckerberg as a character and then playing him change your view of the human?

Sure.

How so?

I mean, I tried to put myself in his shoes and feel the weight of these incredibly complex frontline decisions that have no precedent in the history of humankind, weighing on the one hand free speech, and on the other hand safety. Because, ultimately, every content-moderation decision is about those things: voice versus harm. On the margins, those issues are incredibly complex. So that gave me a different kind of empathy for the person and people having to make those decisions and failing to make them perfectly. Now, I should say, I’m not ambivalent about how bad short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops are on the mental health of our young people. I’m not ambivalent about those things. I’m not ambivalent about the heinous fallacies of Alex Jones or about Holocaust denialism being on some of those platforms, just to be really clear about that. I think those things are unequivocally wrong.

Well, you played Roy Cohn. The big word here to me is sympathy. Sympathy is a much more interesting word and concept, and it seems to be what you’re after. But when it’s so hard to find the good in them, like Roy Cohn—maybe I’m getting it wrong—that seems like a really hard task for an actor.

Well, Roy Cohn was called by someone the “polestar of human evil,” and [the New Yorker staff writer] Ken Auletta told me he was the most monstrous person he’d ever encountered. So, yes, that is hard. I’m not sure looking for the good is the right way to frame it.

What you’re saying is, not looking for the good but looking for how that person sees himself and the world is the important thing.

I think you’re trying to see through their eyes, and you’re trying to understand their struggle.

Who’s the model for you? Who’s the actor who exemplifies, both in process and result, who you’d like to be? You had a Daniel Day-Lewis figure in your past.

I worked for Daniel as his assistant, which was a profound and revelatory experience for me. And, of course, he’s someone who so many of us have been so inspired by—his commitment, his resolve, his willingness to, in his words, make a fool of himself and go out on a limb. Meryl Streep is certainly somebody who we all feel that way about as well. Dustin Hoffman, who recently said to me, “I don’t know how I did it.” And you feel like you’ll never be able to do it again each time.

How much is your approach helpful to a director and to your fellow-castmates? How much does it throw them off? You’re super involved in these things. When you did your own research on Roy Cohn for “The Apprentice,” for example, you yourself ended up adding a scene to the movie that wasn’t in the script that had to do with diamond cufflinks, if I remember.

Oh, yeah.

Is that something that’s appreciated by the people around you? Or how does this work?

I mean—

You’re laughing.

No. I mean, I can’t really speak to that. Of course, it is never my intention to interfere with anyone else’s experience or anyone else’s way of working. First, do no harm, right? But commit to what you’re doing, and utterly.

Meaning that you get frustrated sometimes with other people who are not?

No, just meaning that I’m just there to commit utterly to serving the material. And so if some people feel that I’m taking it too seriously, or it changes the molecules in the room in a way that makes something uncomfortable, I guess that’s something that I don’t feel that I need to apologize for. Because I believe—and I think the directors that I work with all believe—that it’s in service of the material. I personally think that a lot of the reactions to it are of a personal nature.

Did that hurt?

What do you mean?

Well, let’s talk about what we’re talking about in this sense. We met last year at the Telluride Film Festival. I saw you, and I really admire you. I’d seen you in any number of films and I thought, I should walk in the other direction because we had published a Profile of you by Michael Schulman in 2021 that I read as being about a serious artist being not self-serious in the derisive sense, but serious. And, yeah, there were people in it who poked fun at your method because they did it a different way. And I read it in an entirely different way. I did not read this as a Profile that was making fun of somebody above all, or anything of the like, but I know that you were hurt by it—at least in the immediate aftermath of it—and saw it as a betrayal of trust. I admire your honesty and openness in that piece—that’s what was rare and startling about it. But you didn’t feel that way, certainly not in the immediate aftermath.

I would only say that what I shared—what I talked about as a betrayal of trust . . . I’ve had other, different experiences with different journalists, and I feel like it perhaps could have been met with more compassion. And that’s what I would have wished for. But, listen, all’s fair in love and war. So I think the thing about this film, this work, the work that I care most about, Roy Cohn—these are right on the fault line of everything that’s going on in our world right now. And so, if I take my job seriously, it is commensurate with the kind of subjects that I feel that I’m working on.

You did a Super Bowl commercial to make fun of your own seriousness in the wake of that Profile, a Dunkin’ commercial, which was pretty hilarious. Why’d you do that? Did you feel you had to take the air out of that imagery of self-seriousness? Or just to have fun?

It was really that I was asked to do it. Ben Affleck asked me to do it, and the pitch was not something that excited me. And then—

So you rewrote it.

And then I rewrote it and just had an image of, I think it’s Marty Sheen in “Apocalypse Now” coming out of that sludge. And I had a middle-of-the-night image of somebody coming out of coffee beans. It just evolved from there.

But the Ibsen play was a response to that Profile, because Ibsen had written “Ghosts,” which he felt was a deeply personal expression that was met with ridicule and scorn by people who he thought would meet it with understanding and approbation. And “Enemy of the People,” which is about someone attempting to tell the truth to a community, who sees himself as a servant of the people, but is called instead an enemy of the people. This ongoing question about, How does it make other actors feel? It feels along those lines, of trying to make me into an enemy of the people when I strongly see my job as a servant of the people. Not that that’s what you’re trying to do.

I wouldn’t have read it like that in a million years. But I’m not you.

But I think that “The Social Reckoning” is about this. The big question of this movie—and I think a question that hangs like the sword of Damocles over some of these C.E.O.s—is the question that was asked to Benjamin Franklin in 1787. “What have you given us?” “A republic, if you can keep it.” I think that that’s what’s at stake in this movie, as Aaron sees it. These issues of truth decay, of the denial of truth—these things are so potent and so important that, to me, it warrants being completely all in to show up and give these things everything I can possibly give them. So, yeah, if I have a Polish voice for those seven months—

Which is for another film.

Which is for this Peter Morgan film, “The Boys from Brazil”—that’s much ado about nothing.

Meaning that it’s in service to something.

Yeah.

You were in a film about the Chicago Seven.

Yeah.

You played Jerry Rubin, who was the great comedian radical of that group. I remember as a kid reading his classic book, “Do It.”

Yeah. Great book.

And at one point you wanted Aaron Sorkin to spray you with tear gas for the verisimilitude of what was happening at this demonstration. And Aaron Sorkin took your suggestion, in his telling, but he decided that it might hurt a lot of people. But it was an example of your—some would call it craziness, and others would call it devotion to the craft, or the need for some sense of realism. What is that all about?

I want to demythologize that a little bit because, first of all, what you’re alluding to is what happened in Grant Park between the Chicago Police and the Yippies and everyone who was protesting the war in Vietnam—

The Democratic Convention of ’68.

And the Democratic Convention. And if you watch Haskell Wexler’s incredible documentary “Medium Cool,” you’re right in there, and you feel this sort of authoritarian police state and the incredible violence that was happening. So I think what I wanted to do is capture what was at stake and what was happening and what those people were putting themselves through, what they were putting on the line. Now, what I wanted to do, I want to be very clear, involved no one else and would have involved no one else. It was for the purpose of a closeup and to have the physiological effects of what that would be—

Of your eyes burning.

You don’t want to act, is the point. You don’t ever want to act.

I had seen you, as we all had, in smaller roles, but then “Succession” came along, and you play this incredibly complex, sad, damaged, intelligent, unaware—just an incredibly complicated character. But this one is neither entirely made up nor based in a very clear way on a person like Mark Zuckerberg. When you’re looking at it through the lens of the Murdochs, which is the most obvious model, do you just pick and choose from characteristics? How did you create the character of Kendall Roy in concert with your colleagues?

Yeah. I think you’re like a detective, and you’re just looking for clues. So you read everything. Each time it’s different. You really kind of start from nothing every time.

But this time around, you don’t contact James Murdoch or anything?

No, because also I don’t think it was—certainly that family, along with a lot of other families, are in the genome of what Jesse [Armstrong] wrote, but it’s not a one-to-one. It’s not, I would say, about them.

Have you ever indulged in therapy? And, if so, is it helpful in this work?

I mean, sure. I’ve had therapy. I’ve read a lot about psychology. I’m married to a psychiatrist. Is it helpful in this work? Not really, because—I mean, insofar as it gives you a deeper understanding of human psychology, sure.

But an understanding of yourself and your resources.

What I’m trying to do is disappear into a role. That’s what my heroes did. When you see Ben Kingsley play Simon Wiesenthal in “Murderers Among Us,” and then you see him play Adolf Eichmann a few years ago, I don’t see the guy anymore. I just see those characters. So that for me has always been the holy grail.

Do you care how Mark Zuckerberg will react to this film, how he will encounter this film?

I do, yeah.

What reaction would disappoint you or upset you?

I mean, I think my hope is that the film is a dialectic rather than a polemic. There’s a kind of trend, generally, of “it’s all Facebook’s fault”—like, all of it, everything. Now—

Including the weather.

Yeah, it’s all their fault. And I don’t think that that is. When we talk about truth decay and the deterioration of civil discourse, our storytelling plays a really important role in that. I personally—and it’s why I reached out to Mark—was defending him a lot, when we were making the film, to my director.

What were you defending to Aaron Sorkin specifically?

Just arguing for Mark’s point of view, arguing for—

Because you thought he was right, or you thought that’s how he would see the world?

That’s how he would see the world.

It’s a big difference.

Yeah. I mean, I sent Aaron e-mails as Mark sometimes at night. But I’ve taken Jeremy out of this at that point, which I know sounds crazy, but it’s really not. It’s about negative space. You want to create room to enter into this other person’s experience.

Is there an afterlife to it? You finish your role, it’s wrapped, it’s ready to air. Does it still live inside you or is it gone?

I think I’m changed by some of these things. They take you places, experientially. I always answer with other people’s words because they’re better than mine. There’s a poem that I really love by Stanley Kunitz that you might know, called “The Layers.” He writes: “I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray.” ♦