There were times Jeremy Strong actually sent emails to Aaron Sorkin as if he were Mark Zuckerberg himself.

So when Strong was asked by The New Yorker‘s David Remnick whether he cares how Zuckerberg will react to The Social Reckoning, Strong said yes; that’s why he reached out to the Facebook founder in the first place.

“I was defending him a lot when we were making the film, to my director,” Strong recalled of his interactions with writer/director Sorkin while talking to The New Yorker Radio Hour Oct. 2. “I mean, I think my hope is that the film is a dialectic rather than a polemic, rather than there’s a kind of trend generally of like, it’s all Facebook’s fault, like all of it, everything. When we talk about truth decay and the deterioration of civil discourse, our storytelling plays a really important role in that … That’s why I reached out to Mark, and my feelings as we were doing it, is I was defending him a lot when we were making the film, to my director.”

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Out Oct. 9, The Social Reckoning dramatizes the 2021 Facebook leak by the whistleblower Frances Haugen. When he would channel Zuckerberg when reaching out to Sorkin, Strong explained he would take “Jeremy out of this at that point, which I know sounds crazy, but it’s really not. It’s about sort of negative space.”

Strong also talked about his penchant for intense method acting. Remnick asked him to address the time he wanted Sorkin to spray him with actual tear gas during the making of The Trial of the Chicago 7. Strong, who played Jerry Rubin in the Netflix film that Sorkin also wrote and helmed, explained that his request wasn’t meant to put anyone in harm’s way.

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“I want to kind of demythologize that a little bit because, you know, first of all, what you’re alluding to is what happened in Grant Park between the Chicago police and the Yippies and everyone,” Strong told Remnick. “Everyone who was protesting the war in Vietnam and the Democratic Convention. And, you know, 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 want 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 … I want to be very clear, involved no one else and would have involved no one else. It was, you know, for the purpose of a close up and to have the physiological effects of what that would be.”

The Social Reckoning also stars Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku, Billy Magnussen and Betty Gilpin.

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