Aaron Sorkin: ‘I don’t have a political agenda – I’m just trying to capture your attention’

I think that there are any number of people for whom I am not their cup of tea – and that’s okay,” says Aaron Sorkin, with a faint clip to his voice that suggests some small part of him might disagree. “I’ll try to win them over.”

As big-name screenwriters go, there are few more immediately recognisable than Sorkin, who, over the course of four decades, has carried his inimitable style from project to project. Whether we’re in the corridors of the government in The West Wing, or in a Harvard dorm at the genesis of Facebook in The Social Network, characters all speak fluent Sorkinese. That is to say, they speak fast, in erudite Gatling-gun repartee. Often – though not in The Social Network’s case – Sorkin’s scripts have a Capraesque sentimental streak; it’s this, mostly, that seems a sticking point for fans and detractors.

Those averse to Sorkin’s signature three-sugar teas are unlikely, I fear, to be won over by The Social Reckoning, the 65-year-old filmmaker’s pseudo-sequel to The Social Network, 15 years on. But for those still on his wavelength, this is quintessential Sorkin. Here, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is demoted to a side character, Succession thesp Jeremy Strong taking over the part from Jesse Eisenberg.

Focus instead shifts to Anora Oscar winner Mikey Madison, who plays a whistleblower working within Facebook’s civic integrity team, and Jeremy Allen White, playing the investigative journalist who hands her the whistle to blow. The film scrutinises Facebook’s awareness of – and refusal to act upon – the harmful societal effects of its platform, and the systemic radicalisation of users in the build-up to the January 6 Capitol riots.

Sorkin, smartly dressed, startlingly well-tanned and sitting before me in a London hotel suite, started The Social Reckoning after a year-and-a-half of writer’s block, following his 2021 film Being the Ricardos, about TV comedians Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. He took over directorial duties for the film, one of a run of projects he has both written and directed over the past decade. (Up until Molly’s Game in 2017, he was exclusively a writer.) “But this is the first time I’ve known that I was going to be directing it from the beginning,” he says.

Previously, his scripts have been directed by eminent filmmakers – Rob Reiner (A Few Good Men; The American President), Mike Nichols (Charlie Wilson’s War), Danny Boyle (Steve Jobs) and David Fincher (The Social Network) among them. “You’d have to really not be paying attention to learn nothing from these guys,” Sorkin says. “But I’m not David Fincher. I can’t possibly try to be. I have to direct like myself, and look for other strengths.

“I wish I had started [directing] earlier,” he muses. “Because it’s agonising, looking back and thinking, ‘Next time I’ll know to do this, [or] not to do that.’ All I want when I’m done shooting a movie is to go back and shoot it again.”

When he had finished the screenplay, he approached Eisenberg about returning, spending a three-day weekend trying to talk him into it. (“The studio offered him every incentive you can offer an actor to do it.”) Eisenberg, “tired or even a little aggravated” by being conflated with Zuckerberg, refused. So Sorkin turned to Strong, whom he had previously directed in 2020’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, midway through the actor’s breakthrough turn as mopey Succession failson Kendell Roy. “I think [Strong] is the best American actor under 50 that there is,” says Sorkin.

On paper, Strong – a method actor who brings a lot of process to his work – is an odd bedfellow for Sorkin, whose shoots require precise, exacting fidelity to the words as written. “[Sorkin] is very intentional,” Madison tells me. “Every period and comma is important and means something to him. I think I almost felt like I was playing against a lot of my instincts, but I think that was perfect for the character and what was happening with her.”

“He knows exactly what he wants – a lot of the guesswork is gone,” says White. “The process of searching, and finding out what the scene is about: the writing is so strong and so clear that you can get there very quickly. And then it’s just about refining it, as an actor.”

Nonetheless, says Sorkin, the collaboration with Strong “worked great. He’s phenomenal in the movie. I didn’t ever feel like he was straining at the leash to improvise or anything.”

It’s been decades since Sorkin’s work was really characterised as popcorn entertainment. This is no surprise, given the subject matter he trafficks in: US political procedure; civil rights trials; hell, even his baseball movie, Moneyball, was less about baseball and more about the complex ideology of statisticians. Quietly, though, there is a thrilling, classical sense of entertainment to his scripts. The dialogue is intricate but deceptively light; there is always levity and momentum. I bring this up, and he snaps his fingers. “That’s my fault,” he says. “Because I pick important subjects.”

“I don’t have a political agenda,” he insists. “I am not trying to persuade you of anything. I am trying to captivate you for however long I’ve asked for your attention in a dark theatre. Obviously, [The Social Reckoning] is dealing with something serious, but we’re not asking you to eat your vegetables. It’s not Homework: The Movie. Before a movie can be anything else – before it can be relevant, before it can be thought provoking – it has to be good. Not just today, but 50 years from now, it has to work as something that you watch while you’re eating popcorn.”

Would he ever take on something a little more frivolous? There was a time he wasn’t all legislative hearings and tech jargon: think 1993’s Sorkin-written erotic thriller Malice, which starred Nicole Kidman and Alec Baldwin as a sexy-but-sinister surgeon. I know you’ve spoken fairly dismissively of that film before, I say, but… “My problem with Malice isn’t that it’s frivolous! My problem with Malice is that it’s bad!” he interjects. “Which I am allowed to say – I wrote Malice.

“I’m crazy about frivolous,” he says. “Believe me, when I have writer’s block, and can’t think of the next thing, I would give anything to write a bank robbery. To write a romantic comedy. To write Freaky Friday. Anything that I think I have a chance of writing well, I’ll do. Why do I keep gravitating to these larger subjects? Um… I suppose it’s because I have a kind of romantic, idealistic writing style. And it fits more naturally into a larger canvas.”

Really, Malice seems like a lifetime ago for Sorkin, then still at the beginning of his Hollywood career. Born into a Jewish family in Manhattan – his mother a teacher and his father a copyright lawyer – Sorkin started out in the theatre, having graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Musical Theatre.

“Really?” I reply, maybe a little too credulously.

What university did provide, however, was a “great deal of acting training. And I didn’t realise it at the time, but while my classmates were learning how to act, it was going into a different part of my brain,” he says. “I was learning what a play was. And when I got out of school and tried writing dialogue for plays, for the first time, I had a confidence with it I’d never felt as an actor. I was a pretty cocky actor.”

His musical theatre background has also bled through into his work in smaller, odder ways: many a Sorkin scene has descended into an esoteric, pedantic discussion about Gilbert and Sullivan. Or, in the case of The Social Reckoning, a discussion about the 1927 musical Show Boat. “I am, I think, not what anyone would consider cool,” admits Sorkin. “So yes, I lean ever so slightly into the lack of coolness of the characters.”

Sorkin’s big break came at the theatre, with the 1989 military courtroom drama A Few Good Men, which he adapted for the screen three years later and was his inroad into Hollywood. The Nineties brought a handful of other film jobs and a worsening drug problem; it wasn’t until 1995 that he got clean, going sober again in 2001 after a relapse.

He has, by and large, avoided writing his own life story into his scripts, recently telling The New York Times that he feared making characters “too unlikeable”. But choice elements have often slipped in: take, for instance, The West Wing, wherein John Spencer’s genial White House chief of staff harbours his own history of addiction. Or Sorkin’s infamously short-lived post-West Wing series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, in which an ailing Saturday Night Live-esque sketch show is taken over by a pair of brash, zeitgeisty showrunners. One of them, played by Bradley Whitford, arrives at the show amid a scandal over his recently outed cocaine addiction.

“If there’s something that works, by all means, use it,” says Sorkin. “People thought Studio 60 was autobiographical because of the drug addiction [plotline]. But even there, it becomes a character. If there was something from my life that was helpful, that would make for a good story element, I’d use it. But it wasn’t about me.”

Sorkin created four TV shows over the years: the first, Sports Night, was more of a comedy, hampered early on by a rhythm-disrupting laugh track. The West Wing, his magnum opus, was one of the best TV shows of its era, and retains an ardent fanbase to this day. Studio 60 was cancelled within a season, but was never quite the disaster its reputation suggested – looking back today, it’s also noteworthy for drawing career-best work from Matthew Perry. His last venture into TV was The Newsroom, which starred Jeff Daniels as a news anchor dealing with the portentous ethical dilemmas of modern media.

In the 12 years since The Newsroom ended, Sorkin has pivoted to film directing, also writing two Broadway plays (including an adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, in which he wrestles with the politics of the Trump era). It seems like he may have lost his appetite for TV. “I loved series television,” he says. “The thing that’s bad about it was the schedule. When you’re writing a movie, or a play, if you’re stuck, you can call the studio and say, ‘I know I was going to deliver our first draft in June – but it’s probably going to be the end of the summer.’ And they may not like it, but they’ll live with it.

“In television, you have these hard deadlines, air dates, that you have to meet, which means you have to write even when you’re not writing well. And then you have to take this thing you weren’t writing well, and you put it on the table for the cast and the crew, and then you have to point a camera at it. It’s a tough pill to swallow.”

He hints, however, at a return to the small screen – prompted by the less demanding requirements of the modern streaming model. “Now you can have an eight or 10 episode season. It’s a little more sane,” he says.

Sorkin is – surprise, surprise – a fast talker. I came into this interview thinking I had prepared far too many questions, but as our time runs low, I look down at my notepad and realise we have burnt through all of them. One final question, then. I ask about “Sorkinisms”.

On the internet several years ago, a meticulous fan of Sorkin’s work assembled two video montages – a combined 16 minutes in length – containing the many times within Sorkin’s work that idiosyncratic phrases, metaphors or sometimes entire back-and-forths, are repurposed, often verbatim. Two characters have an argument in The West Wing, a decade later two characters will be having the same argument in Steve Jobs: that sort of thing.

“I’m aware that they’re there,” Sorkin says. Is it a conscious choice, when you repurpose old writing? “Sometimes!” he says. “It is more likely I have forgotten that I did that once already.” He smiles, unfazed. “It’s just a bad memory.”

When it comes to Sorkinisms, it’s another case of different strokes and different folks. They aren’t everyone’s cup of tea – not that Aaron Sorkin would mind.

‘The Social Reckoning’ is in cinemas now