Method actors: Jeremy Strong didn’t just play Mark Zuckerberg, he was Mark Zuckerberg

What’s as bad as hanging around Mark Zuckerberg? It’s probably going to be hanging around Jeremy Strong playing Mark Zuckerberg.

Strong took on the role for the upcoming film The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to the 2010 movie about the founding of Facebook, The Social Network.

This time, Sorkin is directing as well as writing, with a story focused on the 2021 Facebook leaks in which whistleblower Frances Haughen exposed Zuckerberg’s company for knowing its products had a detrimental effect on the mental wellbeing of children and on social cohesion, and choosing to do nothing.

Strong took over playing Zuckerberg from Jesse Eisenberg, who didn’t want to do it again.

Strong is known for his commitment to immersing himself in a character, and has been tagged as a “method actor”. “Method” is, simply, considered a way to approach a performance by staying in character even when the cameras are not rolling.

Sorkin said of Strong to The New York Times over the weekend, “He does a tremendous amount of work before he shows up on your set. He did not speak in his own voice on the set or walk the way Jeremy walks.

“I told all the other actors in his scenes, ‘Guys, he’s not going to be hanging out with you at (the catering truck). He’s not going to be yucking it up with you between takes. He’s probably not going to speak to you at all.

“He is going to treat you the way he imagines Mark treats the people around him. And that’s what happened, you cannot argue with the results.”

That can’t have been fun to be around.

Strong’s penchant for becoming his characters haven’t always made him friends. Famously, Brian Cox, his onscreen dad on Succession, the HBO drama for which Strong won an Emmy, found it “f—king annoying”.

Strong has been magnanimous in his responses in the past, and said Cox has earnt the right to say whatever he wants. He has also explained his “method”, “I think you have to go through whatever the ordeal is that the character has to go through.

“If I have any method at all, it is simply this: to clear away anything, anything that is not the character and the circumstances of the scene.

“And usually that means clearing away almost everything around and inside you, so that you can be a more complete vessel for the work at hand.”

It’s generally considered that Strong’s approach was at least partly inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, who the younger actor worked with as an assistant on the 2005 film The Ballad of Jack and Rose.

Day-Lewis is one of the most famous method actors of his and any generation. In portraying a character with cerebral palsy, the real life writer Christy Brown, in the 1989 film My Left Foot, he stayed in a wheelchair the whole production and needed the crew to carry and spoon-feed him.

For The Last of the Mohicans, Day-Lewis learnt to hunt, track and skin animals, and would vanish off into the wilderness while to get into character for In the Name of the Father, he lived in an actual abandoned prison, sleeping on the cold floor of a cell.

Last year, he was defensive about his approach, and didn’t appreciate that people saw it as too extreme.

“It’s with the intention of freeing yourself so you present your colleagues with a living, breathing human being they can interact with. It’s very simple. So, it pisses me off this whole ‘Oh, he went full method’ thing,” he said.

“What the f—k, you know? Because it’s invariably attached to the idea of some kind of lunacy.”

Method actors have always attracted attention precisely because some of the practices have been eyebrow-raising, and everyone loves a good story, whether it’s Austin Butler struggling to shake off Elvis Presley’s voice or Meryl Streep isolating herself, a la Miranda Priestly, from her co-stars on the first Devil Wears Prada movie.

Jared Leto, while playing The Joker in the 2017 film Suicide Squad, channelled his character’s anarchic spirit by sending his co-stars Margot Robbie and Will Smith sex toys and “used condoms”, although he later denied this and said he had been kidding when he divulged the details on the film’s red carpet premiere.

Robert De Niro spent ages working as a cabbie in preparation for Taxi Driver while Lady Gaga said she spoke in an Italian accent for nine months while making House of Gucci. And if you’ve seen that movie, that’s a tragedy for everyone involved.

The most committed – and confusing – example: Joaquin Phoenix who pretended he was quitting Hollywood and shifting gears to be a rapper (remember that Letterman segment?) when, in the end, it was all for a comedy movie I’m Still Here.