Aaron Sorkin, photographed by Austin Augie.
Sixteen years after giving us The Social Network , Aaron Sorkin is back for another round of Facebook. His highly anticipated sequel, The Social Reckoning , starring Jeremy Allen White , Jeremy Strong and Mikey Madison takes a darker look at the platform, this time examining how Facebook helped fuel political extremism and division. Meanwhile, Sorkin, who’s never made a social media account before, remains happily on the outside looking in. He considers the reality we’ve built online “fundamentally phony.” Fortunately, he and his daughter Roxy Sorkin , also a filmmaker, have plenty to talk about offline. Earlier this summer in New York, the two found time to catch up after spending three months wrapped up in their own movie making projects. They got into AI, the agony of watching your own work, their shared love of theater, and showering eight times a day.
MONDAY 4:40 PM AUGUST 31, 2026 NEW YORK CITY
ROXY SORKIN: I’m going to start by saying that we haven’t seen each other in three months.
ROXY SORKIN: It is all my fault. Have you watched your movie today?
AARON SORKIN: No. The last time I watched it was the day before yesterday.
AARON SORKIN: Great. I like where it is right now.
ROXY SORKIN: Good. So today is your first day doing press for The Social Reckoning , despite hating social interactions. Do you like any of this tour actually?
AARON SORKIN: Let me be clear. I don’t hate social interactions. I’m simply not good at them. There’s a difference.
AARON SORKIN: I’m most comfortable when I’m by myself writing a social interaction with two fictional characters, but I’m excited to talk about the movie.
ROXY SORKIN: Yeah, and see audiences watch it.
AARON SORKIN: That I’m very excited for. It’s been a long time. The last two films that I wrote came out during COVID, so they never played in front of an audience. It makes all the difference. A group of strangers in a dark theater, everybody laughing at the same thing, gasping at the same thing, silent at the same thing, crying at the same thing, letting the last moment of the film resonate. When it’s at its best, it can rearrange the ions of the building.
ROXY SORKIN: I honestly never connected that the last two movies you had were during COVID. It’s been a long time.
ROXY SORKIN: You and I do the same thing. I’ll leave a theater if I’m in something or watching something I wrote. I want to hear what the audience does, but I don’t want to watch my creation on the screen.
AARON SORKIN: I have a tough time with that too. It’s been since 2003 that I’ve watched an episode of The West Wing . It’s been since 2010 that I’ve seen The Social Network , or 2011 since I’ve seen Moneyball . I don’t revisit them because I’m just nervous that they’re not going to live up to my memory. But I’m looking forward to The Social Reckoning and then the revival of A Few Good Men , to be pacing the back of the theater and watching an audience watch the play.
ROXY SORKIN: Pacing, that’s very much your signature.
AARON SORKIN: I’ve never sat down to watch something that I’ve written.
ROXY SORKIN: It’s like hearing people say, “I hate hearing my own voice in a video.” I’m like, “Wait till you see your writing on a screen.” You hate hearing your voicemail, I hate watching my movie. It’s the worst thing in the world.
AARON SORKIN: It’s tough, but you find your way. It could be gratifying. I’ve had two plays at the Music Box Theater and there’s an alley outside. I’d be pacing there in the minutes before 8 o’clock. It would sink in: all the playwrights who have paced this little piece of pavement.
ROXY SORKIN: You’ve had a lot of good Broadway moments.
ROXY SORKIN: You said to me once that theater is where the men eat.
ROXY SORKIN: Do you want to explain that at all or just leave it to sit?
AARON SORKIN: Listen, actors in film have a very difficult job and it’s a job that’s related to the job of an actor on stage. It’s definitely a blood relative, but they are slightly different jobs. For one t hing, the camera’s right up here, so the acting is right here. On stage, you have to be believable by playing up there. But you’re doing the entire story in two and a half hours as opposed to the two or three months that you’re doing it bit by little bit in a film. Your entire day is geared toward 8 o’clock. You’re supposed to be doing nothing during the day, just relax and start to get your energy up and explode at 8 o’clock. And at 11, you have to walk out into the night having had a thousand people going, “Aah,” in your face. But no matter what kind of show business success a person has had—being in a hit movie, being on a hit television show, winning Emmys and Oscars—there is nothing like being in a hit play in New York.
ROXY SORKIN: Absolutely. People say that they don’t understand why theater is so godlike to me. But my feeling is, that’s my religion. In this household, that’s the final form. That’s the thing that we all pray to.
AARON SORKIN: Honey, that’s the other thing. I love that you seem to have inherited my love of theater, that these buildings are cathedrals.
ROXY SORKIN: 100%. How could you not see them as that though? They’re all the most gorgeous structures where you live a human experience. Growing up on sets and with so many cameras and equipment, there’s something really pure about walking into a form of entertainment where you’re not seeing wires. You’re just with human beings.
AARON SORKIN: That’s right. Now, listen, cinema at its best can do the same thing.
AARON SORKIN: But I think I told you about this after you saw Joe Mantello’s revival of Death of a Salesman .
AARON SORKIN: I saw a black-and-white photograph of people in 1949 or 1950 walking out of the old Morosco Theatre where the original production of Death of a Salesman was. The doors are open after a Wednesday matinee and the audience is flooding out into the street and they’re all businessmen. They’re all in gray suits with their heads down and their shoulders kind of slumped. What’s incredible is that Wednesday matinees most commonly are populated with senior citizens, students, and tourists—people who don’t have to be at work on a Wednesday afternoon. But this play had opened five or six months ago, and word had gotten around of what kind of effect it was having, and these men didn’t want to cry in front of their families. I’ve never seen such a perfect representation as that picture of what theater can do at its best, how powerful it can be.
AARON SORKIN: I was at a dinner and I happened to be seated next to Barry Diller, one of the producers of the production of Death of a Salesman , and we were talking about AI and I was giving my opinion that I’m optimistic about the future because I think the audience is going to reject it.
AARON SORKIN: I had been looking at an abstract painting on someone’s wall, and I liked it. I don’t know anything about art, but I had some sort of connection to it. And the host came over and he said, “You know who painted that? A machine.” I was impressed by this technology, but whatever connection I had to the painting was suddenly gone. And Barry Diller, who I was telling the story to, said, “Well, that’s completely irrational.” I said, “Barry, our relationship to art is irrational. A thousand people a night, eight times a week, come to your theater and leave crying their eyes out even though they know that the whole thing was fake. They paid to be there in those seats.” Anyway, now you may ask another question.
ROXY SORKIN: Actually, this is going into something that’s not dissimilar to that. I was going to ask you a question about how little you interact with social media and with technology. Where did you get to emotionally in trying to figure out social media to research this movie?
AARON SORKIN: You know what? Except for this movie and The Social Network , I don’t have a relationship with social media, which makes me sound like one of those people I would roll my eyes when they’d say, “I don’t have a television set in my house.” I was just never interested in social media. I obviously have an opinion about it though. The fact of the matter is, I don’t think you need to have a Facebook or Instagram or TikTok account to really experience social media anymore. I still read some actual papers, and generally what’s being quoted is something that somebody posted someplace, and then the reactions to that person posting it. So I am able to be cynical about social media without actually participating in it.
ROXY SORKIN: Yeah, but also what would you do with an Instagram? Would you post a selfie? I could never see that happening.
AARON SORKIN: No, I wouldn’t. What The Social Reckonin g is mostly about is Facebook’s role in the rise of extremism, divisiveness, and hyper-partisanship. There is a whole other movie to be written about the fact that any time you introduce a camera or a tape recorder into a situation, it automatically becomes less honest. And because Mark Zuckerberg’s dream has come true that—well, it’s really Justin Timberlake’s dream in The Social Network —that we lived on farms, and we lived in the cities, and now we’re going to live online. We do live online, that’s the reality. And I find it to be a fundamentally phony reality.
ROXY SORKIN: I don’t think anyone would argue with that. Speaking of now, a lot of the actors that you worked with on this movie are very much method actors. Do you feel like you connect with the more intense group of people or actors because you’re very method in your writing and directing?
AARON SORKIN: Yeah, I am very physical when I’m writing. I’m saying all the words out loud. I’m up and down from my desk. In this particular case, I lunged into a mirror acting out a moment and broke my nose. Jeremy Strong tries to minimize as much as possible anything dishonest about what’s going on. He’s not nuts. He knows he’s making a movie. There’s going to be a camera there and there’s going to be 80 crew members standing around, but anything that he can eliminate that’s dishonest, he’s going to. I don’t think it’s how he prefers to work, I think that he doesn’t know any other way to do it. If he was able to do it another way he would. He’s very hard on himself. Is that why I’m drawn to Jeremy? I’m not sure. I know that the actors in The Social Reckoning , both of the Jeremys, Mikey Madison, Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku, Billy Magnussen, Betty Gilpin, Patrick Fischler, Nelson Franklin, Joey Brooks, they are all different actors. But to use a baseball metaphor, they all know how to get on base.
ROXY SORKIN: Absolutely. It’s funny because on the first day of shooting, Jeremy said, “Let’s not exist in the fire. Let’s build the fire together.”
AARON SORKIN: Yes. What he was talking about was—for most movies, you have to shoot out of order. In this case, we had to shoot one of his last scenes first. So he said, “Guys, let’s just get together and just read through all the scenes that lead up to here.” But when he was saying that, he was saying that in Mark [Zuckerberg]’s voice.
ROXY SORKIN: I’ve never experienced anything like that in my life. I turned to Billy and I said, “I’m really nervous.” The second thing that happened was Jeremy walking into a room as Zuckerberg and one of the first things he said to me was, “We’ve got to get this together,” and then walked away. I thought I was going to die.
AARON SORKIN: Well, he went from us to The Boys from Brazil where he’s playing a Polish Nazi hunter, a month or two after we wrapped. He was speaking in a Polish accent and he was just that character. Like I said, I don’t think he knows how to do it another way. Also… It’s totally gone in my head what I was going to say. It was good, shit.
ROXY SORKIN: Shoot. Was it Jeremy related? Was it Nazi related?
AARON SORKIN: I don’t think it was Nazi related. Man, was it theater related? Shoot. This is what happens when you turn 40.
ROXY SORKIN: You have said in virtually every interview that you didn’t want me to go into show business, but we’re sitting here doing show business.
AARON SORKIN: Let’s be clear. It is a material breach of the deal I made with god on the day you were born that you have become a filmmaker. Okay? That’s, like, Salgari-level betrayal.
ROXY SORKIN: You say that and, genuinely, my first memory of life is calling action.
AARON SORKIN: I liked when you came to work. Who would want that? But I didn’t think you were going to do it.
ROXY SORKIN: Can you imagine if I did something else?
AARON SORKIN: It would’ve been great if you would have just worked at a pet store. Or a little flower shop. What’s wrong with that?
ROXY SORKIN: By the way, after directing one movie, I’m done. I could totally do a flower shop right now. After watching a director’s cut this morning, I’m a veterinarian.
AARON SORKIN: You watched the suicide cut?
ROXY SORKIN: Yeah. The pre-director’s cut, post-suicide cut is where I am. I’m somewhere in that nightmare. But I got really excited about a needle drop this morning.
AARON SORKIN: You see? The nightmare, bit by bit, starts to turn into a dream.
ROXY SORKIN: Whoa, profound. What’s your wind-down routine tonight after all this? Has football started?
AARON SORKIN: The day before yesterday was week zero of the college football season. So yes, football is a wind-down. As you know, I would never smoke marijuana.
AARON SORKIN: I would never do that. And I would never let you do that.
AARON SORKIN: Do you take a lot of showers?
ROXY SORKIN: I take about—and this is going to make me sound crazy—eight baths a day.
ROXY SORKIN: After every outside thing or professional engagement, there’s a bath.
AARON SORKIN: I don’t get taking a bath at all. It’s stupid. Why would you sit in a pool of still water that’s getting cooler every moment instead of rushing hot water? But I take several showers a day, especially if writing isn’t going well. I take a shower, change my clothes, and start again. It’s a fresh start.
ROXY SORKIN: Yeah. Well, you and I both have back problems. You gave me two things. Bad sight—we’re both wearing glasses—and the worst back a human ever had. So a bath for me is like, whoa, hot water on my back.
AARON SORKIN: There were a couple of other things.
ROXY SORKIN: There were a few other things.
AARON SORKIN: A roof, food, college education.
ROXY SORKIN: I thought you were going to go with writing, talent.
AARON SORKIN: Well, I’m not going to take credit for your talent. Okay?
ROXY SORKIN: Sure. Okay, last question. You can ask me anything and I’ll answer honestly.
AARON SORKIN: Hmm. Would you say you had a happy childhood?
AARON SORKIN: All right. Thank you, Ms. Sorkin.
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