The Actor Among Other Agents

Yesterday, Variety published an interview in which director Aaron Sorkin talks about actor Jeremy Strong, who plays Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning, the sequel to The Social Network. Strong, Sorkin said, didn’t speak in his own voice on set, didn’t walk as he normally does, and treated his fellow actors »the way he imagines« Zuckerberg treats people.¹ He had warned the cast in advance not to expect much from him between takes.

»A performance isn’t an imitation of reality. It’s an intervention in it«

This is usually filed under »Method acting« – an actor »becomes« the character rather than merely pretending once the camera starts rolling. But something stranger is happening here. Strong wasn’t representing Zuckerberg to a camera. He was representing Zuckerberg to other people. And that distinction changes everything.

Acting is usually imagined as a kind of substitution: the actor becomes the character, alone, in front of a lens. But an actor never performs into a vacuum – he performs toward somebody, who reacts, and that reaction becomes part of the scene. Theatre theorist Konstantin Stanislavski’s later work, known as the Method of Physical Action, made this explicit: rather than manufacturing a character’s inner state directly, the actor could discover it through physical action within the real circumstances of the scene.² Acting, in other words, is already a feedback loop between agents, not a monologue delivered at one.

The idea runs deeper than acting theory. Philosopher-sociologist-psychologist George Herbert Mead argued that the self itself emerges from social interaction; we become who we are partly by anticipating, and absorbing, how others respond to our gestures.³ Sociologist Erving Goffman later made the theatrical metaphor literal: everyday life, he argued, is already full of performances in which people manage the impressions they produce on one another.⁴ The actor isn’t the exception to ordinary human behaviour, but an unusually explicit kind of agent: someone given permission to alter his or her social interface more radically than the rest of us.

That makes a film set a peculiar kind of system – a cluster of agents, some of whom swap their ordinary interface for another one as the camera starts rolling, while the director and crew keep constructing the circumstances in which these fictional people appear to exist. Strong’s account makes the swap unusually visible: according to Sorkin’s description, Zuckerberg occupied Strong’s behaviour even when no camera demanded it. The fiction had entered the real social environment of the production, not just the footage.

But the swap has a limit. Nobody asked Strong to actually hurt anyone in order to play a man apparently capable of hurting people at scale, just as most of us decide against walking into the office naked, even if some would secretly prefer that. The interface can change, but it cannot fully detach from the systems that keep it from doing damage.

A performance of Zuckerberg changed how Strong behaved. That changed how his colleagues behaved. Their behaviour changed what the camera recorded. The recording becomes the film. The film will change how audiences imagine Zuckerberg – and that perception can, in turn, change how the real Zuckerberg, Meta, journalists, employees, and investors behave toward him. The representation has entered the system it represents.

A performance isn’t an imitation of reality. It’s an intervention in it.

We are all constantly producing versions of ourselves for other people, and those versions provoke responses that alter us in turn. The actor is different only in degree: granted permission to change the interface more radically than the rest of us. And the camera does something stranger still, carrying the result somewhere else, where the loop can start again.

What happens when a representation begins to change the thing it represents? Perhaps that isn’t really a question about acting. Perhaps it’s a question about what it means to be one agent among other agents.

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