You may have heard something about The Apprentice—the Donald Trump biopic that premiered at Cannes to great fanfare, and not a little controversy. Was director Ali Abbasi’s 1970s set film, starring Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as his mentor, the New York attorney and ruthless power broker Roy Cohn, too sympathetic to the striving, scheming characters at its center? (Maybe not: After Cannes, Trump’s lawyers threatened to sue.) Certainly when you watch The Apprentice, which opens in theaters Friday, it’s impossible not to be astonished, and enthralled, by the performances of Stan and Strong, who turn real-life hyper-polarizing figures into fascinating antiheroes.
But make no mistake: The Apprentice is a warning. This is a movie, written by the journalist Gabriel Sherman, that will leave you chilled. Here is the story of Trump’s rise, the lessons he learned from Cohn, and a portrayal of power at all costs—what it drives a person to and how it corrupts.
Vogue invited Stan and Strong onto The Run-Through with Vogue to talk about their performances, how the film came together, and why Americans should see it before the November 5 election. Below, read an excerpt of the conversation Vogue.com editor Chloe Malle and I conducted with the two actors in the podcast studio.
Taylor Antrim: We have three weeks until the election and I want people to know why they should go see this movie. A lot of people have Trump fatigue, and The Apprentice is two hours of being deep in his company.
Jeremy Strong: This movie is very loaded, right? It’s hard to talk about it in a non-partisan way… But I think the movie has as much in common with Midnight Cowboy, or Boogie Nights, or even, like, Scarface. It’s more those things than it is some political polemic.
You know, I read something the other day by this journalist who lived in Chicago, Sydney Harris, who said, “History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done.” And I guess I feel that the stakes are so fucking high right now in a way that they have never been, maybe since the American Civil War. And so it’s worth understanding where Trump came from and what he really is and believes.
Antrim: I also want to make sure people understand how radical this movie is, that it makes you participate in the humanity of people that you may feel you can write off. You know, like, we may understand that Trump is a monster. Or we understand that Roy Cohn was a monster, but the movie makes you participate in what they were like as human beings.
Strong: There’s a reason why it makes people so deeply, profoundly uncomfortable to relate to them that way. It’s much easier to be like, Well, they’re monsters…why would I want to feel anything or have any empathy or understanding? And I guess I find that really interesting.
Antrim: Sebastian, what was going through your mind when you were asked to play Trump? Because I would imagine that a lot of actors would just say no, or be scared of this, or be like, Are you crazy?
Sebastian Stan: I guess I had enough people saying maybe that this movie wasn’t a good idea, that it started to sound to me like a good idea. And then I think it was more, okay, well, if the right person can come and play Roy Cohn, then it’s really going to be exciting—and obviously then we found Jeremy. The director, Ali Abbasi, being Iranian, and growing up in Copenhagen, and being an outsider, having that lens on this—that was what was interesting to me. He wasn’t playing for the blue or the red team, he was looking from the outside in, and I think we were too far in the trenches on our own over here.
Chloe Malle: Did you have any sense from the beginning that a movie about Trump would be controversial, dangerous, difficult to get out there?
Strong: Totally. I mean, you know that you’re playing with fire—how could we not know that? But I don’t think that had any impact on how we approached it as artists. I think we related to it as a piece of work and as a film about these two guys and their relationship.
Malle: It had trouble getting distribution coming out of Cannes, and then Trump’s lawyers threatened to sue. Did you anticipate any of that?
Stan: Of course, it seems kind of predictable that way. But I didn’t anticipate how hard it was to get the financing.
Strong: Also, if I’m being honest, I think I expected the movie to get scooped up out of Cannes. But then everyone was frankly scared to touch it. I think they were afraid of litigation and repercussions and afraid of Trump, and so now it’s opening this Friday on 1,500 screens or something like that, and I do think that this is something that is imperative for people to see.
Antrim: What I resonated so much to is that the movie is not a piece of propaganda, or it doesn’t have a particularly straightforward message, to me. I mean, it was actually a quite discomfiting film to watch for that reason.
Strong: I like to believe that we all have instincts towards other human beings. And I think if you watch this film, it’s not just learning about Trump as it is about learning about ourselves through him.
Antrim: That was definitely my experience of it. [To Stan:] And I find it interesting that your character, Trump, is someone you empathize, if not sympathize, with in the beginning of the movie. I’m thinking about when he’s knocking on doors, collecting rent, that kind of thing.
Strong: A lot of people didn’t know that he did that.
Antrim: And then by the end of the movie, Jeremy, your character, Roy Cohn, is this incredibly tragic figure.
Strong: Yeah, in this case, the apprentice sort of eclipses the mentor, which is what happened historically. But I think, you know, what was exciting and challenging about this is to take these two monolithic people and say they’re not monoliths. They’re human beings with a history and a past, who made choices, and different things shaped them, and let’s examine what those things were.
Antrim: The transformation that Sebastien achieves in this movie is uncanny. It’s physical. It’s verbal. It’s the way he moves.
Malle: And you make him very appealing.
Strong: I mean, look, if you go back to the Oprah show that he did in 1988, when she had him and Ivana on the show. I mean, he’s very seductive. He’s very convincing. He comes across strong. He comes across as protective of the country. I mean those are qualities that we still see today. And I think even when you dial further back, right, you’re talking about someone that came in with ideas and I guess what I was thrown by was just the amount of potential that I felt like he had at a certain point. And I don’t think there’s any fault in admitting that, because by admitting that then you can kind of see what the turnout was—and that is tragic, in some ways
Malle: Jeremy, I want to know what the most surprising thing about Roy Cohn was for you. Because I was very excited to see his frog collection.
Strong: I mean, the frogs are really a stunner. He had a room full of frog figurines and stuffed frogs and, you know, a Mickey Mouse sign on his door that said “Roy.” He had a kind of arrested development. He was very infantilized, even in his adulthood. And he lived in a consequence-less universe. He is a grab bag of surprises. And a kind of terrifying one. So you might talk about him as this monster, but for Roy, he was, like, going to Le Cirque, eating his Bumble Bee tuna that they kept for him there. He was going waterskiing most days of the year on the Hudson River.
Malle: Really?
Strong: He was at Studio 54. Like, he was pumped. And he was a brilliant lawyer, and he represented everybody. And everybody went to his parties on 68th Street. And he was capable of the utmost ruthlessness. And mendacity and brutality and remorseless destruction of people’s lives.
Malle: I loved the fashion in the movie. Were you involved in those decisions?
Strong: Roy was incredibly vain. You know, he did 200 sit-ups every morning. He basically starved himself. He weighed himself every day. He maintained his weight. I knew exactly what he weighed. And it’s interesting how much you can lose the character if you are in the wrong cut of a suit. He had these Dunhill suits that fit a certain way that accentuated a certain kind of muscularity that he thought of as his most defining feature—not that he was a muscular guy, but his kind of bellicose thing.
Malle: I have to say, at Vogue.com, we are big fans of your outfits. We think that you have excellent style. The youth at Vogue.com are big, big fans of Jeremy Strong’s red carpet looks.
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Strong in a custom velet tuxedo and ribbon bow tie from Loro Piana at the 2024 Tony Awards. Photo: Getty Images
Strong: I mean…Thank you. It’s just accident and chance. I’m very intuitive, you know? I’ve gone through phases where, like, there was a time where I only wore gray for a couple years. I only wore navy.
Malle: A couple of years!?
Strong: I only wore navy for a couple of years.
Malle: Good grief, okay.
Strong: I had a period as a child where I wore neon only.
Antrim: Oh yeah, I had one of those too.
Strong: You know, we all did. But I appreciate and love clothes. And then the rest is kind of like guided by instinct.
Malle:. Sebastian, how would someone dress if they were playing you in a movie?
Stan: Just by wearing…black, I guess. Michael Fisher is my stylist. I tell him sometimes that I don’t know if those sneakers work, but other than that… Sometimes I’m like, really, Michael? I mean, you saw the whole pink thing that I wore two years ago at that Met Ball? I mean, that’s not what I would have worn, ever.
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Stan wearing Valentino pink at the 2022 Met Gala. Photo: Getty Images
Strong: I thought that was kind of dope.
Stan: I mean, it was great, but my mom, still to this day…she’s got a neighbor from Italy and she’s like, You look atrocious. How could you do this? Anyway.
Malle: Well, we’re still talking about it!