Portia Doubleday on Her ‘Social Reckoning’ ‘White Girl Wasted’ Role

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “The Social Reckoning,” now playing in theaters.

Aaron Sorkin’s new film “The Social Reckoning” begins with a vignette about the impact of social media that’s as chilling as any statistic about the dangers of social media. And Portia Doubleday sits at its center, portraying the human toll of Facebook.

In the first chapter of the new film, entitled “White Girl Wasted,” we see Doubleday’s character, Kaylee, standing by her stalled car on the side of the road. When two police officers (Sierra Capri and Michael Braugher) pull over and approach her, she tells them that AAA is on their way to assist her; she’s also visibly impaired, slurring her speech and combating them at every turn, even as her face is buried in her phone.

Even as it seems the cops have nothing to go on — as she’s within her rights under California law to refuse to cooperate with their requests, they tell her they’re going to let her slide — Kaylee insists on intensifying the interaction, spewing racist and misogynistic invective at the cops and then capturing the consequences on video, declaring in a screeching monologue that she is “being treated like a fucking immigrant” and broadcasting it to subscribers of the “Voice of Reason” channel online.

This interaction, one that will feel unfortunately familiar to any viewer who’s spent time online this decade, sits at the heart of “The Social Reckoning.” Sorkin’s follow-up to “The Social Network,” the 2010 film he wrote about the earliest days of Facebook, “Reckoning” confronts the world Mark Zuckerberg has brought into being.

Kaylee is a person whose particular brand of rage could only exist in a post-social media world. After all, we learn she’s something of a changeling: Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) knew Kaylee as a bleeding-heart leftist. By the film’s end, Frances has been so moved by Kaylee’s trajectory that she decides to spill the secrets of Facebook’s indifference to the harm it causes. Kaylee, meanwhile, joins the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Doubleday may be best known for her work on USA’s Emmy-winning drama “Mr. Robot,” in which she played a conflicted employee at the series’ central villainous tech concern, E Corp. As she tells Variety, on the week of “The Social Reckoning’s” release, the way technology affects our cognition is a live concern for her, and has had direct consequences in her own life.

When you first read the script, did you have a vision for Kaylee? Did she remind you of anyone or anything that you thought you might draw on?

I live in Los Angeles, and I know what’s going on in the world. And I actually have known a couple of people who were radicalized, and they actually came to mind. During COVID, I was actually pre-med for like three seconds.

Whoa! What?

Yeah, there was nothing to do. But that’s a big thing to do. It was actually really difficult — cell bio is just excruciating. But I actually knew a couple people that were in the pre-med track and who were radicalized. And to know them so well and find that out was … I didn’t really understand. I think I still don’t quite understand how that happens. How can you understand the organelles of a human cell and understand what the scientific method is and how important facts are, and yet still believe that COVID can come from a 5G tower?

I remember they were showing me these videos, and I couldn’t make sense of it. And so that’s kind of where I started with my own personal experience of what happens to a person. Repeated exposure can start to make extreme ideas feel normal. I kept thinking, “They’re in an echo chamber, and they’re seeing these really bizarre videos that look like they’re made in a basement, and they’re seeing them so often that I think they just have acclimated to the fact that there are these possibilities that they want to be in on.” They want to be cracking the conspiracy or these other truths that are not being examined.

So I started there, and built from that place. I started to better understand how does a seemingly normal person turn out to be the one that you see in the beginning of the movie. What is that process like?

That’s an interesting perspective, and one that I think is important in contemporary life and for this movie — that the radicalized are not some strange, naive other people, but people like you or I who fell prey to incredibly powerful technology.

I think it’s the important perspective to have, because often I think that people see these videos and they think, “Oh, that’s a very faraway person. Something is wrong with them. They were raised and born that way.” That’s how I viewed it. You know, I viewed it as really away from me, and that’s not what happened. And so, having close relationships with people who were lovely and finding this out about believing in Pizzagate, I was really interested in the social science perspective of that. You know, what does gaslighting look like in human form?

And I think that that’s also what [Kaylee] is in the movie, right? She’s the human component. What happens up close when one human is affected by this huge company’s massive influence? Or what can happen when you have that much power to influence the way that people think, especially when you’re giving them repeated exposure to certain ways of thinking?

I interviewed Aaron Sorkin for a different story, and he mentioned that he’d had conversations with Frances Haugen, and that the character you play is drawn from a real story from Frances’ life. What were the conversations you had with him about Kaylee like?

I think Aaron wanted it to be really grounded. That was really important, especially because — and we talked about this a lot — we didn’t want the moment to be about being under the influence, [as if] that is why this person is acting this way, but that this is actually how she feels. So we spent a lot of time grounding it and making sure that you saw what Frances saw with her friend, what we see online, and what my experience was with people that I’ve met that have just fallen into QAnon radicalization. It was really important that it felt real.

A couple of things are happening that I think are easy to see: the entitlement and the victimization. Like she’s the victim in that moment; she feels perpetrated. And why is that? To dumb it down to “She’s a racist” would be reductive of what’s going on. That’s not really what that moment’s about. It’s: How do people, over time, change — especially with repeated exposure and influence? I remember watching these videos and thinking there’s something so emotional about it. It’s almost like an emotional addiction, and you become a part of a group, or you become a part of some way to vindicate yourself from your own pain or your own victimization by making somebody else the enemy to sort of justify the anger that you have within yourself. Those are the things that I brainstormed with him about because I was concerned [that it might] fall into this trap of “Oh, this drunk girl that’s just super erratic.”

I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of acting the scene. Sorkin writes very rhythmic dialogue that is meant to be delivered note-perfect down to the comma. And, in the scene, you’re slurring your words. Did this present a special challenge?

I was scared about that, actually. I remember Aaron sort of said this when we were rehearsing. He was like, “Just trust the words. They’ll save you.” Trust that you can land on them — and that is true. I don’t know how to explain it, but there is something unbelievably comforting, and I knew it when I read it, when I first got it … It infects your body, that rhythm. If you can get that rhythm in your body, it just feels like molasses. It just sort of runs together because he’s so brilliant. It affords the actor, actually, the ability to live within the constraints of words that you know are going to catch you. So instead of feeling like you might have to add or create a beat or figure out how to pull your truth out of a moment, he makes that process unbelievably effortless.

We actually shot it in two days, which was lovely, because it was a pretty heavy scene, you know.

How did you feel at the halfway mark, walking into night two?

When the stakes feel this high when you’re working with someone, I just let myself feel. Because I trust him to know how to direct me, and he’s approachable and really funny and really warm, and what a joy to feel like “Hey, this lands.” I felt like I had the liberty to play a little bit. It was more about finding the level that he wanted. Where does that escalation begin, and why? Like, where is the moment where this person decides that they’re going to turn this night into what you saw? And I think that there is that moment where she’s sort of calculating; there’s like a moment where it turns, and I think he was really specific about that. I’m always nervous, but thankfully, he’s a great director, so that gave me the liberty to try different levels and see what worked and what didn’t.

I’ve been comparing your work here to Rooney Mara’s at the start of “The Social Network”: It’s a one-scene performance, but it defines everything that follows, and we briefly glimpse each character again. In your case, you had to act as Kaylee storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. How did that feel to shoot?

I remember Jan. 6 and how I felt that day, and … I never thought that I would be doing this. I never thought I would actually have to put myself in those shoes. And it made me really, really sad. I don’t want to get too emotional. It just made me really sad, because I had some space from it — especially given how loud things are, and there’s constant stuff going on every single day. But to actually be in that, there’s just something so tragic.

That’s why I appreciated playing this character so much — because she’s a human consequence. She is the one who would be there. Behind amplifying extremism and misinformation and Facebook’s hand in this: What is this doing to one person that ends up being there? I was grateful to examine someone who has been part of what I’ve criticized — but it was really challenging. I had mixed feelings about it. Even that day, [Sorkin] kept saying, “Turn around and take in where you are, and [take in] that those people really believed it.” That’s what’s so gut-wrenching: [they’re] really believing that they’re doing the right thing. And that is what produces, for me, the anger and the rage and the sadness. That they feel how I feel when I’m standing up for something that I believe in. It’s the same.

I first saw you on “Mr. Robot,” which was a show all about how the digital world is not separate from our real lives — it’s hopelessly intertwined with them, redefining reality. “The Social Reckoning” has similar concerns. Do you spend a lot of time thinking about these issues?

Yeah, of course. I don’t really share too much online. I just talk to myself about how angry I am about things that are going on. And it’s interesting how people feel about AI, because watching this film, you see this person who may have had a good idea to connect people, and the consequences of it being this massive, and having this much influence and the ability to radicalize small groups of people who can actually cause a lot of harm. Where we’re at with AI, I feel like it’s really comparable. I don’t really think we fully understand the implications of what this is going to do to the world, and we’re sort of at the precipice. As a ’90s child, I’m just like, what is happening? The entire world is just going to massively change, and there’s going to be huge consequences to these changes. And who’s thinking about that? You know, like who’s ensuring that we’re actually going to be OK?

That’s what I’ve been thinking about the most after “Robot.” I spend time concerned about it — I’m sure you do too. A lot of people do. Look what happened at Facebook. So what’s going to happen now with OpenAI? What is our future going to look like?

We could discuss that for hours, and I think we’d emerge pretty dispirited. But I wanted to close the loop: What ended up happening with your pre-med studies?

It was like the most incredible experience I’ve ever had. To be honest, taking the bio classes I took opened my brain to a whole different world. But I just was like, I still want to be an actress, and I don’t know if I can make a 20-year commitment. You know what I mean? I don’t know. Can I go 16 hours and just eat Top Ramen?

I still think about it, though. It took me 20 years to finish my degree because my parents didn’t want me to become an actor. My dad was all about, you know, “If you’re stupid, you’re going to be evil, and you have to be smart.” And so it took me 20 years, but I got my B.A. — I took a little pre-med journey, and I finished! I’m not actually pre-med. But who knows what will happen?

This interview has been condensed and edited.