Next week, Aaron Sorkin will see the theatrical release of The Social Reckoning, his long-awaited follow-up to The Social Network, as well as the start of the Broadway revival of A Few Good Men.

The leadup is stressful, not just because of the workload, the film premieres, the press frenzy, or, as Sorkin jokes to The Hollywood Reporter, “the potential for career immolation.” But also because Sorkin is returning to two topics that have been benchmarks in his career.

“I’m very proud of the film. I’m excited for people to see it, and I’m proud of the play. Probably, if I could choose, I wouldn’t have them happening at the same time. But it’s a pretty glamorous problem to have,” Sorkin says.

Sorkin is revisiting and refining A Few Good Men more than three decades after its Broadway premiere, which came after he penned the military court drama on cocktail napkins while working as a theater bartender. The play led to a feature film and helped launch the rest of his career. This production brings back Bradley Whitford (who made his debut in the original stage show), alongside Tom Blythe, and Krysta Rodriguez.

With The Social Reckoning, which is scheduled for release Oct. 9, the anticipation comes, in part, as Sorkin said it has not had the traditional test screenings and few people have seen it due to the level of security Sony required around the film due to the subject matter. The film dramatizes the true story of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) and Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy White). He adds that he himself has not spoken with Meta or CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the film, but that Sony had received a letter.

“I think it was just making the studio aware that Meta has lawyers,” Sorkin said.

Sorkin had been reluctant to write a follow-up to The Social Network, in part because he says he “didn’t want to be the writer of Jaws 2,” but also because he couldn’t initially see where the next story should be. Even now, Sorkin does not see the film as a sequel but sees it as more of a story set in the same universe.

The idea began germinating after he spent several years speaking with Haugen and Horwitz, who published the exposé on how Meta had allegedly been aware of the negative impacts on its platforms on teens and in spreading misinformation.

The breakthrough for Sorkin came when he asked Horwitz what the “inciting action” was for Haugen to turn from devoted Facebook employee to whistleblower and was told that she had a friend who had been radicalized by the social media platform and she wanted to find out how. This led Sorkin to be able to see the first scene of the film, which is always a necessary step for him to start a new project.

“I was eager to write it, and I hadn’t written anything in about a year-and-a-half, and it was just an epic period of writer’s block, and I really wanted to write this scene,” Sorkin said.

“It’s kind of like walking through the woods at night with a flashlight. You can only see as far ahead as the beam will go, but the further in you walk, the further you can see,” Sorkin added of his writing process.

Sorkin had also been approached a few times about reviving A Few Good Men, which ran on Broadway from 1989 to early 1991 and was developed into the 1992 film, starring Tom Cruise as the indefatigable military lawyer Lt. Daniel Kaffee defending two soldiers charged with killing another soldier in a hazing that turned fatal. (Cruise took on the role after Nicole Kidman saw the play and suggested it would be a good part for him, Sorkin said.)

Sorkin said yes to the Broadway revival this time, because he was asked by The Lincoln Center and Tony Award-winning director Michael Arden, and also because he had the opportunity to “do a little polish” on the play.

“Obviously I have very fond memories of it. But I look back on it kind of the way I look at my high school yearbook picture,” Sorkin said.

The timing with the current political environment also felt particularly apt.

“Suddenly, we are talking about illegal orders and what to do when you get one,” he said.

Sorkin initially wrote the play while bartending at the Palace Theater during the Broadway run of La Cage Aux Folles (“There’s not much to do during the first act. So I was writing ‘A Few Good Men’ on cocktail napkins,” he said.) The plot was inspired by a conversation with his sister, a lawyer who had just joined the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps and was visiting Guantanamo Bay to deal with a “code red,” or the off-the-books punishment enacted by fellow soldiers against one of their own. While Sorkin did further research on the case in preparation, he largely fictionalized the rest of the story.

The original play also gave Bradley Whitford his first big break, as he later took over the lead role of Kaffee during the run, and then, notably went on to more roles within the Sorkin universe, including Josh Lyman on The West Wing.

“I do remember standing backstage for the first night when I was going on as Kaffee, and being so terrified, and just thinking, ‘You could sentence people to this, and crime would go down. Why did I volunteer for this?’” Whitford said.

In the upcoming production, Whitford takes on the role of the antagonist, Col. Jessup, the explosive commanding officer questioned about his role in the hazing, opposite Blythe, who is taking on the role of Kaffee. While Jessup was portrayed by Jack Nicholson in the film (who memorably delivers the line “You can’t handle the truth!” while being questioned on the stand), Whitford has stayed away from clips of Nicholson, and has developed his own idea of the character, after playing opposite several Jessups in the original production.

“I would often see it as a person who seemed like a Democrat, who I knew was going to trash the classroom, as opposed to a Republican who jogs,” Whitford quipped.

This is also the latest in a string of antagonist roles for the Handmaid’s Tale and Get Out actor, but Whitford said that’s not entirely intentional. “I don’t think I’m at all like that in real life. I find it, you know, difficult to send a steak back, but I can play a monstrous asshole. I don’t know why I have that skill,” he said.

Instead, he notes that he was always drawn to Jessup, because while he may seem explosive and unpredictable, he makes some compelling points about the need for a strong leader in Guantanamo amid the play’s argument about “Is the way to survival dominance or cooperation?”

Ahead of the first preview, Oct. 8, Sorkin said he cleaned up some dialogue and made a few plot points clearer, and then left Arden and the cast alone for a few weeks of rehearsal. He told the cast and crew to “treat this as a new play,” meaning that if something isn’t working during previews, he’s open to rewriting more. During the first read-through Whitford also provided some advice to his fellow cast members gleaned from years of working with Sorkin.

“Now he’s this sort of institution, and I kept going around to all the actors going, ‘You can ask him questions. You don’t have to treat him with reverence. You don’t have to be scared.’ He’s actually a writer who adores actors,” Whitford.

Throughout his career, Sorkin has been drawn to writing about other institutions, in the form of the military or the government, or even something like a newsroom in The Social Reckoning. While he struggles to pinpoint exactly why that is, Sorkin acknowledges that he does have a “romantic” idea about how these institutions should function in American democracy, even while recognizing that they’re “user sensitive.”

When it comes to this production of A Few Good Men, which opens Oct. 29, Sorkin said he largely hopes it’s a great night at the theater. But given its timing, he also hopes audiences listen to the message of the play.

“The people who take orders in the military, they’re going to follow orders. They’re not going to say, “Are you sure? And they’re not going to look in a law book to see if they’re allowed to do it. So we need to pay attention to who’s giving the orders,” Sorkin said.