NEW YORK — Even in an election year, most seem to agree on one aspect about Ali Abbasi’s much-debated Donald Trump film “The Apprentice”: Sebastian Stan is a remarkably good Trump and Jeremy Strong is chillingly riveting as the New York power broker Roy Cohn.
One reviewer recently wrote that Strong’s portrayal of Cohn is “uncanny in its accuracy.” The critic? Longtime Trump advisor Roger Stone.
Since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May, after which the Trump campaign pledged legal action, “The Apprentice” has been hounded by controversy. Its makers have had to fight to secure a theatrical release, which, in opening Thursday, comes just weeks ahead of the election. The Trump campaign has called it “election interference by Hollywood elites.”
“We’re way out on a limb,” Strong says.
The movie, about Cohn’s mentorship of a young Trump in the greed-is-good 1980s, is a dramatic election-year provocation. It’s an origin story of the Republican nominee beginning with Cohn, the ruthless attorney whose tactics of deny-deny-deny made him a sought-after fixer for the mafia, chief counsel for Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt and a guru to Trump when he was trying to make a name for himself in New York real estate.
“His defiance of reality, and his denial of reality, to me are the signature components of what he instilled in his star pupil,” Strong says, noting that Cohn’s boat was named Defiance. “It’s a legacy of mendacity and lies and denialism and the aggressive pursuit of winning as the only moral measure.”
“The Apprentice,” directed by the Iranian-Danish filmmaker Abbasi and scripted by Gabriel Sherman, puts the Cohn-Trump relationship at its center, and in doing so, gives Strong and Stan two of the best roles of their careers. Strong calls Cohn “probably the single most fascinating person I’ve ever studied and interrogated and attempted to inhabit.”
For two much-satirized figures, the performances are uncommonly humanistic. Cohn has a rich tradition of portrayals, including Al Pacino in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” But Strong’s Cohn is uniquely authentic and camp-free. Trump, of course, has been mostly played with “Saturday Night Live”-style parody. But Stan’s Trump is a blank-slate striver, eager to be molded by Cohn. Abbasi says, “I still don’t know exactly how he did it.”
“For him, there’s a special kind of risk-taking,” Abbasi says of Stan. “He has another path of career with the superhero stuff. But Sebastian, on the other hand, has always been someone who takes big chances. He’s been humanizing a lot of douchebag, sleazebag characters — people you don’t want to be. But somehow when you see Sebastian play them, you think, ‘Maybe he’s not that bad.’”
Most actors wanted nothing to do with playing Trump. But Stan signed up, and stuck with the production over several years.
“I went on the ride,” Stan says. “And it was a ride, too, because it wasn’t a movie that came together very easily. It’s a movie I’ve known of for a while. I originally met Ali in 2019.”
“Of course it felt risky,” he adds. “But honestly that factored into the decision, in a way. It sort of plays more into this recent approach to things I’ve taken. It started for me about five years ago. I really started to think of fear as a motivating factor in it maybe being the right sign that I need to commit to something. It’s very easy to just keep doing things that you feel you’ve gotten good at. Then something comes along and it feels like such a crazy mountain to climb.”
That may go doubly for “The Apprentice,” a movie that cobbled together financing and struggled to find distribution before Briarcliff Entertainment stepped forward this fall. Sherman first began writing it in 2017. He had covered the 2016 Trump campaign for New York magazine and took note when a Trump associate commented on Trump employing Cohn’s strategies.
“The idea came to me a flash,” says Sherman. “That’s the movie. Donald was Roy’s apprentice. Let’s do an origin story, a mentor-protege story about how this relationship set Donald on the path to becoming president.”
Trump, who first met Cohn in 1973 and remained close friends until Cohn’s death in 1986, has spoken about his admiration for him. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy,” Trump told author Tim O’Brien. “He brutalized for you.” Politico’s Michael Kruse in 2016 detailed the relationship, writing: “Cohn’s philosophy shaped the real estate mogul’s worldview and the belligerent public persona visible in Trump’s presidential campaign.”
More historical analysis of Cohn is on the way. Kai Bird, who wrote “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” on which Christopher Nolan’s film was based, is working on a biography of Cohn.
“Roy Cohn is suddenly one of the most influential people in our country, posthumously, because of what he imparted to Donald Trump,” says Strong.
Strong had first been drawn to playing Cohn several years ago for a project that ultimately didn’t happen. But it got Strong thinking about the intriguing paradoxes of Cohn. If finding a character means finding their pulse, Strong says, “in this case, it’s a sort of reptilian pulse.”
“In terms of a sociological, anthropological study, I find him to be a completely fascinating character,” says Strong. “My own judgments have to be left at the door. But it was like peering into the heart of darkness.”
For the two actors, “The Apprentice” posed a particular challenge in balancing judgment and empathy. The film has engendered a spectrum of reaction. Abbasi has claimed Trump might not dislike the film and invited him to see it. (“It’s an open invitation,” Sherman says.) Others have criticized the movie for bringing any degree of sympathy to its lead characters.
“The only way we can learn is through empathy,” Stan says. “We have to protect empathy and continue to nourish it. And I think one way of nourishing empathy is showing what it’s exact opposite can be.”
“(Cohn) didn’t believe in showing vulnerability,” says Strong. “He was only interested in projecting strength, and I find that very tragic.”
Following four seasons of HBO’s “Succession,” which imagined a fictionalized Rupert Murdoch in Logan Roy, Strong found himself again exploring the ruthless machinations of power in New York City.
“I can draw a line between those two, certainly. Rupert Murdoch is at a party at Roy’s house on 68th Street in the film, and Roy and Rupert did a lot of business together,” Strong says. “In some ways I’m a Zelig around these subjects and themes.”
Strong was famously pilloried for a 2021 New Yorker profile chronicling his earnest approach to staying in character. But Abbasi was still sometimes thrown by Strong’s Method ways. “There were days,” the director says, “where I was like, ‘Why is he not looking at me? Does he hate me?’ Oh, he’s in character.”
Strong describes transforming into Cohn as “self-erasure,” a process for which he needs to enter “a state of mono-focus” in order to “change the stamp of your nature.” But he’s also hesitant to over-emphasize his immersion.
“It’s all a game. It’s a game, so I don’t get lost in it,” Strong says. “I’m in the boundaries of the game, but I’m just committing to that game.”
Stan has joked about his own Method acting in one scene where continually eating cheeseballs led to a rough morning on the toilet. Adopting Trump’s diet, he says, messed with his health. “I finished the movie and got my blood work done and they were like, ‘Your LDL levels are much higher, like 50% higher,’” says Stan, chuckling.
At the same time, Stan also drew from his own experience. Like Abbasi, Stan, who grew up in Romania before coming to America, has a partially European perspective on Trump. He remembers coming to New York with his mother at age 12.
“She said to me, ‘This is where it happens. This is where you become somebody,’” Stan says. “I really took that in stride. And I’ve had a very love-hate relationship with this thing that she passed on to me.”
Ultimately, the makers of “The Apprentice” argue that all of the tools of drama serve a vital role in bringing a deeper understanding to even the most polarizing political figures.
“My rule of thumb is that if everyone’s happy, something’s wrong,” Abbasi says. “I’m not afraid of controversy. It’s not where I get my kick. But I also knew it would follow with some of this stuff. The kind of movies I like, they have a temperament, like people. You have people who are nice and polite and neutral, but those are not the kind of people you usually remember. People can be bad-tempered or foul-mouthed and you remember them. I want to be one of those people you remember, movie-wise.”
Strong and Stan find themselves in the unlikely position of being scorned by the potential future president for a movie that had to resort to seeking money via Kickstarter. (The campaign has collected more than $400,000. ) As much as they’re far out on a limb, both are seen as in contention for their first Academy Award nominations.
“Do I think it’s going to change people’s minds? I’m not sure,” says Strong. “Do I think it will help anyone who sees this movie have a great understanding of the origins of where we are now? Yes, I do. And do I think it could infinitesimally move the needle in a direction that I hope we move in? I do.”