A closely guarded early screening of the film—still not quite finished—in August revealed that character to be a perfectly Sorkinian creation: wary, wry, and nerdily superior, given to spouting data points and calling out mixed metaphors. (Pity the colleague who compares her both to the Trojan priestess Cassandra and the boy who cried wolf.) Not long after they connect via LinkedIn DM, she and Horwitz are sparring like siblings—she, skeptical that he actually understands the information she’s leaking; he, disturbed by her belief that Facebook can still be a tool for good, even after seeing its emphasis on free speech and community-building distorted beyond recognition. (The film’s dutiful unpicking of the ties that bind big tech, politics, and the media makes its early October release date—just a few weeks ahead of the midterm elections—especially apropos.)
I ask how Madison found White as a scene partner. Much of the movie has them hunched over a laptop, discussing the mechanics of Facebook’s algorithm. (There have also been some similarities in their particular career trajectories, with both working for years on a family dramedy before a darker, more-grown-up part made them a sudden sensation.) “Very sweet,” she says. “Very, very, very professional. Stoic. I appreciate his work ethic.”
Sorkin’s set could not have been more different from Sean Baker’s. “It was challenging, in some ways, especially because Anora was the movie that I did before Reckoning. That was an entirely different energy and vibe and had so much improvisation,” she says. “With Aaron’s dialogue, it’s scientifically perfected, in a way.”
He expects you to say it as written, I offer, intending it as a question.
“And I want to too,” Madison replies. “Because every line and every word is very intentional, and so it’s important to do that in a certain way.”
If she wobbled at all, adjusting to the rigors of his filmmaking style, Sorkin wasn’t aware of it. “Mikey doesn’t need much more than: Play it a little hotter…a little cooler…. Drive to the end of the line…, things like that, and she’s there,” he says. “As great as she was in Anora and as great as she is in The Social Reckoning, I’m certain that she hasn’t yet done the best work that she’s going to do.”
Of course, the funny thing about her playing a Facebook wonk is that Madison herself is not on social media at all. She was, for a time—in middle school she was one of the millions of other 13-year-olds Instagramming slices of pizza or cookies on a cooling rack—but it was never an obsession, and eventually she forgot the account existed. (Only recently did her father discover that her Instagram was, indeed, still live.) Now it’s a more deliberate thing, staying offline. “It feels kind of big and vast and stressful,” she says, referring, it seems, to the internet in general. Acting may have made her slightly less shy, but Madison still describes herself as “sensitive”—too nervous to read reviews (“I don’t think I ever did until Anora, but that was only after someone told me it was safe and I wouldn’t get my feelings hurt”) and certainly too delicate to confront a comments section.
