Bradley Cooper Loved Hanging Out With Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg

It would appear that Bradley Cooper and Mark Zuckerberg have developed an unconventional friendship. They’ve never met, but Cooper claims to have grown close to the Meta founder via the embodied experience of one of our strangest working actors, Jeremy Strong. Nightmare blunt rotation? Yes.

Strong was profiled by GQ (again), which means there’s a fresh rolodex of strange anecdotes and eccentric quotes for us to read and think: WTF? At the time of the interview, the method actor was inhabiting the spirit of a Polish Nazi hunter, but before that, he was Zuckerberg, reprising Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal in the upcoming The Social Network follow-up, The Social Reckoning. The profile also featured several quotes from Strong’s contemporaries, including Cooper, who revealed that he developed a strange closeness with Strong’s Zuck over the course of his inhabitation.

“I enjoy very much talking to him when he’s in the throes of these other people,” Cooper said. “I love it. I’ve talked to Mark Zuckerberg many times—I had a whole friendship with Mark Zuckerberg, and Mark Zuckerberg has no idea.” Creepy, but it begs the question: Who would be worse on a first date, Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg, or the actual Zuckerberg?

Turns out Cooper has grown into a gigantic Jeremy Strong fan since meeting him at Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2012, adding that Strong’s performance as Kendall Roy in Succession moved him to tears: “I was like, I can’t believe that’s the guy I met [in Williamstown]. What a fucking actor this guy is.”

While I’ve gone on the record as saying method acting is stupid, I have to respect Strong’s commitment to the bit. Actors are a weird breed, but this guy belongs to an entirely different species.

“[Strong] called me six or eight weeks ago,” writer-director Aaron Sorkin also told GQ, “and without any introduction, he was just speaking as an Eastern European Nazi hunter, talking to me about the movie we had just made, without saying, ‘Hey, listen, this is going to sound strange, but…’” Right…

“He’s my friend,” Cooper said. “I can’t say I have that many in this business, but I consider him my friend.” But if I called a friend to vent about a problem and discovered that they were temporarily pretending to be one of the most evil people in the world, bent on ending humanity as we know it, so to speak, I might be a little pissed off. Different strokes. 

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