One and a Half Days at Aaron Sorkin’s Canadian January 6
Earlier this week, large groups of masked men, some wearing Carhartt and tactical gear while carrying American flags, roamed Howe Street by the Microsoft offices in downtown Vancouver. It was quite the sight in general but especially unnerving at a moment when Canadian-American relations are so deep in the toilet that they’re in the Pacific Ocean. Word on the street is that Aaron Sorkin is to blame. Reports were circulating online that his latest project, The Social Reckoning, began filming in the city on Monday, October 20, and he apparently kicked things off by reenacting the January 6 insurrection on Canadian soil.
Sony Pictures describes the movie, which Sorkin is both writing and directing, as a “companion piece” to 2010’s The Social Network. (David Fincher is not returning.) Jeremy Strong is taking over the role of Mark Zuckerberg from Jesse Eisenberg, but the film will reportedly center on Mikey Madison’s Frances Haugen, the whistleblower whose leaks to The Wall Street Journal drew attention to, among other things, the platform’s lack of regulation around anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, its negative impacts on the youths, and Meta’s quiet dismantling of an internal anti-misinformation initiative, which she argued enabled the attack on the U.S. Capitol — hence the J6 reenactment, which will be just one of several threads but certainly adds to the dramatic stakes. On Tuesday morning, a Madison fan account on X posted a video from the shoot: a convincing facsimile of insurrectionists storming the steps of the Capitol, which in this case is a re-dressed Vancouver Art Gallery. The post has since been deleted, but there’s no shortage of other evidence. On Reddit, one user uploaded photos from the scene. (“They’re actually using paid actors this time,” someone replied.)
Shortly after seeing the tweet, I drove downtown for a look and found the riot to have spilled out onto the street. I knew I was in the right place when I saw a guy in a military vest with an American flag draped across his back emerge from a tent and wander to the craft-services area, where a man was prepping a giant bowl of carrots. The square in front of the art gallery was cordoned off, but camera cranes could easily be spotted from the street. On the corner of West Georgia and Howe Streets, extras playing large militia mobs marched with testosteronic intensity: A voice shouted “Okay, reset!” over a megaphone, and they swiftly trotted back into position on the sidewalk with the pep of a Broadway musical. I pulled out my phone to snap a clear picture only to get the stink eye from production security. Actual Vancouverites barely stood by to watch the commotion. “They’re shooting a movie all week,” a barista told me when I stopped for coffee at a spot across from the gallery. I asked how she felt about seeing crowds in MAGA hats, camo, and American flags. “Oh, I don’t know about all that,” she said.
Vancouver is a perfectly anonymous city. If you look down most streets, unfocus your eyes, and ignore the weather, what you see could easily pass for many cities in North America. That quality, combined with a prodigious tax-credit program, has made it Hollywood’s favorite doppelgänger. Last year, The Last of Us turned the block around a friend’s apartment into a postapocalyptic Seattle, full of abandoned cars and lush, overgrown foliage, for a few weeks. My first apartment here was a short walk from Happy Gilmore’s house, located in the ritzy Shaughnessy neighborhood. So many of the restaurants and public spaces I frequent are constantly blocked off for filming, usually for Tracker. But the notion of replicating January 6 in the heart of Vancouver’s downtown feels extra funny. In an era of 51st-state tensions, there’s something psychically fitting about Canada, America’s top hat, being used to reenact so many of America’s sins. Just last week, another crew took over a Trees coffee near the city’s famous Gastown steam clock to shoot The Altruists for Netflix with Anthony Boyle as Sam Bankman-Fried and Julia Garner as Caroline Ellison.
On Wednesday, I swung by the art gallery again, planning to loiter a little longer, but the set was already coming down. The crew was hauling fake Capitol doors into trucks. Feigning ignorance, I walked up to someone monitoring the proceedings and asked what was going on. “They’re setting up for a farmers’ market,” she said. Obvious disinformation, but not entirely wrong. Within a few hours, actual vendors would take over the square selling produce.
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