Many actors have portrayed Donald Trump onscreen over the years, from Alec Baldwin to Brendan Gleeson. Sebastian Stan wanted his turn to be different.
When Stan was tapped for the lead role in The Apprentice, a movie that follows the then real estate mogul’s friendship with notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, he did his own research. He read countless interviews and watched as much footage of Trump from the ’70s and ’80s as possible, listening to him “nonstop” and “getting that into [his] bloodstream.”
Stan told Yahoo Entertainment that immersing himself in Trump’s early life revealed a side of him many might not expect to see as we’re “inundated” by media coverage of the former president, who is running for reelection.
“Looking back on some of those earlier interviews with him when he was really young and trying to get tax abatements to [build] the Grand Hyatt, there was something … pure and honest, and there was great potential that I saw in that person at that time,” he said. “I was fascinated to see what has happened to this man.”
Stan said that under Cohn’s guidance, Trump became more “brutal.”
“The loss of empathy and humanity, I think, was really tragic,” he added.
The Apprentice was written by Gabriel Sherman, a reporter who covered Trump’s life extensively before the presidency. Stan’s impression evolves as Trump gets older, taking on the voice, mannerisms, appearance and speech patterns that the former president is now known for.
“As the success kept growing, so did the persona and the brand that he was building,” Stan said. “I find all of this stuff to be a shtick at the end of the day, and I would actually argue that it’s more conscious than subconscious on his part.”
The changes, at first, are subtle scene by scene — until at the end of the movie, when Trump is shown repeating Cohn’s three “rules of winning,” sounding more like his former mentor than the Trump seen at the beginning of the film.
Stan said he worked with director Ali Abbasi to trace Trump’s evolution in a way that is “digestible to an audience that already was coming into the theater with a lot of impressions and projections.”
Abbasi, an Iranian-Danish filmmaker, didn’t know much about Trump until he went viral for slowly descending on an escalator in front of a crowd before announcing he was running for president in 2015.
Abbasi told Yahoo Entertainment that bringing an outsider’s perspective to a story about the Republican presidential nominee was both a strength and a weakness.
“It’s probably not a good thing to fetishize some of these things too much, you know?” Abbasi said. “I think we approach this era and these characters with a lack of reverence or respect, which gave the movie its edge or its rawness.”
He might not have picked up on the significance of certain clubs Trump frequented, but he wanted to look at the story “more as an anthropologist” who looks at characters “in bigger context” rather than judging things as high- or lowbrow.
Stan said he felt like the opportunity to play Trump was “something that I guess I couldn’t ignore, ultimately,” though he was nervous about it at first. He was drawn to working with Abbasi as the “captain of the ship” because he offers a unique point of view as someone who lives abroad.
“Sometimes we need to look at the people that are looking down at us … to help us get perspective of what’s happening in the trenches,” Stan said.
Trump’s lawyers filed a cease and desist letter against the movie after its Cannes Film Festival premiere in May, calling it a “malicious defamation” that “should not see the light of day.” Following the film’s Oct. 11 theatrical release, Trump condemned the movie in a Truth Social post as a “cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election.” In response, Abbasi wrote in an X post that he was “available to talk further.”
Abbasi told Yahoo Entertainment that he didn’t think the film would be so controversial — in his eyes, it’s “raw but balanced.”
“[Screenwriter Sherman] did a really beautiful job of fact-checking and rigorous journalistic work,” he said. “When we worked on the script together, there wasn’t a moment where I thought, ‘This is … a dirty secret that nobody knew!’ It was well researched and the sources were out in the open. There’s nothing here that you can’t find with one Google search.
“I wasn’t naive about [Trump] being a divisive figure, but I was maybe a bit naive about how the rest of the world would embrace that and how the corporate structure in Hollywood would want to jump on the opportunity,” he said.
After Trump’s legal threat, the film struggled to find a distributor. Its first week in theaters only generated $1.6 million at the box office, but Abbasi wasn’t bothered.
“More people went in to watch #TheApprentice in a weekend than a whole week of Trump rallies!” Abbasi posted on X.
The Apprentice is in theaters now.
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