Jesse Eisenberg did not waste a lot of time letting the world at large know he wasn’t interesting in playing Mark Zuckerberg again. Eisenberg began saying so early and often, in fact, including way back in February 2025, months before Aaron Sorkin’s Social Network follow-up The Social Reckoning had even entered formal development. And one of the main guys he made this clear to was Sorkin himself—which didn’t stop the writer-director from giving his former star what sounds like an incredibly hard sell in trying to get him to come back.
We’ve reported on aspects of this story before, including the fact that Sorkin—who says it never initially occurred to him that Eisenberg wouldn’t return—spent three full days trying to break through the Oscar nominee’s stockpiles of reserve (and a general lack of desire to be stuck with this particular techbro albatross hanging from his neck for the rest of his life.) But Sorkin has now gone into considerably more detail about those efforts in a recent Entertainment Weekly interview, including revealing that he wrote himself an outline of points he tried to marshal against Eisenberg’s formidable defenses.
“This is the only time I’ve written myself an outline,” Sorkin revealed. “I don’t do it for the movies, but I did it for my conversations with Jesse. It was arguments for why he should do it. They included, ‘We already know you’re gonna be great because you were already once.’ You know, ‘Here are the great moments that you’re gonna get to play in the movie.’ And I laid it out for him.”
Among other things, Sorkin noted that, Eisenberg being who he is, the big paycheck the studio was waving at him was basically a non-factor. “I knew what the studio was offering him to do it, but money does not motivate Jesse. It’s infuriating,” Sorkin said with a laugh. “If anything, money is a disincentive for him. It’s admirable. He’s very concerned about raising his kids with too much money.” (That being said, Sorkin did at least try to incorporate the paycheck into his battle plan, including presenting the actor with a list of “all the things he could” do with the money, including “produce X number of Broadway plays of his own.” No dice.)
And while Sorkin admits he probably never came all that close to convincing Eisenberg—who once noted how sick he was of being associated with Zuck by saying “It’s not like I played a great golfer or something, and now people think I’m a great golfer”—he does take some pride in moving the needle at least a bit. “I do remember Jesse saying at one point during the third or fourth back and forth, ‘You have come closer to changing my mind than I thought you were going to.’ So I was pleased about that.”
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