Between The Social Network and The Social Reckoning, you’ve now written two different versions of Mark Zuckerberg, both drawn out of reality but existing in your story as fictional characters. What relationship do you see them as having to one another, and to the real Zuckerberg?
In The Social Network, Mark is young. We see him as a college kid who, like a lot of college kids, doesn’t really fit into the social structure. He believes, somewhere, that there’s a cool kids’ table that he hasn’t been invited to—so he creates his own, one that he can be the mayor of. It’s easy to empathize with that. We get it. We don’t like the things he’s going to do in order to stay mayor, but we get it. Mostly, what’s nice is this idea of a website where you can keep track of the people you went to school with, where you can meet someone new.
Fast forward sixteen years, and Facebook has added the newsfeed, powered by an algorithm—which means you’re getting the news you want, which is different from the news that I get, which is different from the news she gets, and so on. Mark is now the head of the largest media company in the world. He was, at the end of The Social Network, the youngest billionaire in the world. He’s now worth about 120 billion dollars. His company is valued at a trillion dollars. And he is making catastrophic decisions.
In terms of the character, first of all, one of those Marks, [in The Social Network,] was played by Jesse Eisenberg, and the other, [in The Social Reckoning,] is played by Jeremy Strong, and so there is bound to be a different interpretation. He’s also now married, with kids; he has a family that he cares about, right? There’s a line [in the film] where he says, “I know what people think of me; so does my wife, so will my kids.” I think that we can all empathize with that.
At the end of The Social Network, we leave Mark alone in this conference room, where he’s going to settle with the Winklevoss twins, and with Eduardo [Saverin]; and, as Rashida Jones’s character says, “Pay them. In the scheme of things, it’s a speeding ticket.” With this, he is by the end really faced, you’ll forgive me, with this reckoning; all around him are pictures of what he’s caused, and screens showing conversations being had on Facebook, and we leave him alone in that group.