In Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice,” there is a scene where Donald Trump (played by Sebastian Stan) gets a hair transplant to remove a bald spot as well as liposuction to look slimmer.
The film follows Trump as he starts out as a local real estate developer in the 1970s to become a national celebrity in the 1980s. He learns the power game from Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), a ruthless and hedonistic political fixer. Hair department head Michelle Cote, along with prosthetics leads Sean Sansom and Brandi Boulet, were the artisans responsible for transforming Stan into Trump and helping to pull off the sequence.
As time passes, Trump starts to lose his hair and gain weight to the point where he’s popping amphetamines to help with his weight loss. But it doesn’t work.
Stan gained 15 pounds for the role to reflect Trump’s body transformation; the costume department also made a padded suit with a prosthetic belly. “Any of the scenes where his shirt was off or his robe was open, we’d put the fake piece on him,” says Boulet. The team used the prosthetic abdomen for a look they nicknamed “Pills Donny.”
“We had a fake belly that we made for Sebastian for part of his ‘Pills Donny’ look, which was my favorite one to do, because he was all red, blotchy, always eating and sweaty and a little disheveled,” Boulet explains.
Due to his hair loss and weight gain, in the film, Trump resorts to plastic surgery. For the hair transplant scene, Sansom reveals that they used “the top of a fake head with a scalp. Michelle had a toupee, and an area was cut away where the scalp would be removed. The hair was punched in one hair at a time, and the piece was rigged with a bloodline, and the scalpel had a bloodline on it too — and it was shot in one day.”
When audiences are first introduced to Trump, he’s much younger, so Boulet used prosthetic lift pieces on Stan’s face. “We pulled his cheeks and eyes up and tightened his face to make him look younger,” Boulet explains, adding that “for skin tone, we had him a bit lighter than the classic orange that you see at the end.”
Cote even gave Stan a blonder wig with medium sideburns for that early phase of Trump. But it was an evolving look, with his eyebrows, hair and skin tone all changing as time passed. “When he’s younger, his hair was golden because he was outside more and had some natural highlights,” Cote explains. “As he got older, he lost his highlights and [his hair] became darker.”
To capture Trump aging, Boulet would lower Stan’s lift pieces. Cheek plumpers were then added to “bury” the actor’s chiseled face and defined cheekbones. “He had an upper dental plate that didn’t cover his teeth. They were lumps under his lips that pushed the [mouth] area out more so that it was flatter,” Samson explains. “And they were put into his lower lip to give him that Donald look from the nose down.”
One challenge that the team had to navigate was Stan’s facial hair. With day-long shoots, Stan’s facial hair would start to emerge, which meant constant touchups were necessary. “He’s got a five o’clock shadow the minute he starts shaving. So, we had to work with little things like that where we’d have to cover it and blend the prosthetic.”
Makeup artist Colin Penman recalls being captivated while watching the monitor when Stan and Maria Bakalova, who plays Ivana Trump, recreated the 1988 Oprah Winfrey interview. “I knew we had something because there’s this fine line where we don’t want to do a parody. We want it to be real,” he says.
In addition to his weight gain, Stan came fully prepared to play and capture the essence of the former president. “Production had put aside a large file of reference videos and photos that everyone was using,” says Sansom. “We were trying to recreate and reproduce some of the photos as best as we could.”
Boulet adds, “Sebastian had everything. His phone was full of research. He’d come in the morning and would be studying and watching videos.”