There’s a chance for a casting shakeup in The Social Network II as Jeremy Strong is being eyed to replace Jesse Eisenberg.
Variety reported on Thursday, July 31, that Strong, 46, is the top choice to play Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the follow-up to Aaron Sorkin’s 2010 biopic. The role was initially played by Eisenberg, now 41, in The Social Network, for which he earned an Oscar nomination.
Oscar winner Mikey Madison and The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White are also in talks to star in the movie, per the outlet. No offers have been made.
Us Weekly has reached out to Sony, Strong and Eisenberg for comment.
News broke last month that Sorkin is writing and directing The Social Network II for Sony Pictures. Deadline reported in June that the new film is not a sequel but a follow-up to the original story. The movie will be based on The Facebook Files, per the outlet. The Facebook Files are a series of articles that divulged the inner workings and potential harms of the social media platform. The documents were leaked in October 2021 and published by the Wall Street Journal.
The Social Network originally starred Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, Rooney Mara and Andrew Garfield. It followed Zuckerberg during the early days of Facebook when he created the platform in college. The movie earned critical acclaim and won Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score and Best Film Editing at the 2011 Academy Awards.
While The Social Network was a hit amongst viewers, Zuckerberg, now 41, called the film “hurtful” and claimed it was dramatized for entertainment purposes.
Jeremy Strong is subtly weighing in on his former Succession costars poking fun at his method acting. The actor, 46, elaborated on his process while discussing his role as Roy Cohn in The Apprentice film, telling Deadline on Tuesday, January 7, “When I look at the kind of transformational work based on historical characters that […]
“I think the reality is that writing code and building a product and then building a company actually is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about,” the businessman claimed in a 2014 Facebook Q&A Live. “So you can imagine that a lot of the stuff they probably had to embellish and make up. If they were really making a movie, it would have been of me, sitting at a computer coding for two hours straight, which probably would have just not been that good of a movie and these guys, I think, want to win awards and sell tickets.”
He continued: ”They went out of their way in the movie to try to get some interesting details correct, like the design of the office, but on the overarching plot, in terms of why we’re building Facebook to help connect the world, or how we did it, they just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful. I take our mission really seriously, and we’re here not primarily to just build a company, but to help connect the world… The thing that I found the most interesting about the movie, was that they kind of made up this whole plot line about how I somehow decided to create Facebook to, I think, attract girls.”
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