Entertainment Weekly – Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong peel back the layers on Donald Trump and his mentor, Roy Cohn, in the year’s most controversial biopic.
Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong are pulling back the curtain on Donald Trump’s origin story in this year’s most polarizing film, The Apprentice. The duo go toe-to-toe in visionary director Ali Abbasi’s punk-rock biopic, which charts Trump’s (Stan) rise in the ‘80s from wannabe mogul to global icon — all thanks to his mentor, Roy Cohn (Strong).
In Entertainment Weekly’s cover story on the film, Stan, Strong, Maria Bakalova (who plays Ivana Trump), Abbasi, and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman open up about the challenges they faced, Trump’s legal threats, and releasing the incendiary movie just weeks before the U.S. election. Check out our full cover story for The Apprentice, and see all of EW’s exclusive photos of Stan and Strong below.
“Our initial reaction to playing these characters was, ‘Wow, we finally have our Midnight Cowboy,” Stan says, referring to the 1969 Best Picture winner starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman.
“We’re both actors who look for chances to take risks, chances to do something transformational, and we both embrace walking the plank,” adds Strong.
Like many when news of his casting broke, Stan initially couldn’t see himself as a young Trump. “It’s funny, I felt similarly about a few things I’ve worked on,” he says. “My initial reaction is, ‘Wow, how the hell am I going to do this?”
His friends and family also had concerns. “I had people tell me not to do it,” he admits. “I had people tell me I don’t look like him. I had people tell me that it’s not safe for me to do it. I had people say that I shouldn’t try to alienate half the country.” And yet, he found those doubts to be “weirdly motivating,” adding, “I have a very interesting relationship with fear. It’s taken me a few years to develop it, but I’ve come around to trying to confront it.”
For the role of Cohn, Abbasi says he was looking for an actor “who’s not afraid to be out there and own the grotesqueness” of the character.
“Jeremy is an unusual actor. Even the other actors think Jeremy is unusual, and they’re all weird,” he jokes. “I think the unusual thing about Jeremy is he can be very intellectual and very intuitive at the same time.”
Both actors disappeared into their roles for the duration of the shoot. Asked what they learned about each other during the production, Strong quips, “Nothing at all. In fact, when I did a play last year, and Sebastian came to see it after we’d finished and we saw each other in my dressing room, I felt like I was meeting him for the first time.”
“The timing of the shoot just didn’t allow for anything outside of it,” adds Stan. “And I think in a way that was really beneficial.”
To prepare for the role, Stan did extensive research into the former president. “There was fortunately extensive amounts of material out there, certainly on YouTube, in documentaries, interviews he had done, and I compiled a collage of things, quotes, point of views from interviews over the years,” he explains.
“I studied them as best as I could for as long as I could, so I could have them in my arsenal to pull from in the moment when we were shooting because Ali wanted a very free-flowing, spontaneous documentary style take on this, which required a lot of improvisation, which meant that Jeremy and I had to be extremely well read.”
For Strong, finding his way into Cohn meant starting at the beginning. “I guess a lot of it with Roy, like in most people, is his upbringing, his childhood, his relationship with his mom and his father, who was a prominent judge,” he says of the controversial lawyer.
“He lived with his mom well into his 40s,” he adds. “He was like Little Lord Fauntleroy — everything was done for him, and in a sense, he never grew up. He was like an evil Peter Pan. He was eccentric, he was gleeful, and he was unrepentant, ruthless, merciless.”
Describing Cohn as “one of the most influential figures of the 20th century,” Strong says of his relationship with Trump: “If those two hadn’t met, everything might be different. I really think it’s that portentous and that significant.”
“This is a movie about the relationship between these two outsiders who became the ultimate insiders,” he adds. “Two people striving to understand and command the levers of power using Roy Cohn’s playbook: Always attack, deny everything, and never admit defeat.”
“It has to go beyond something simply mimetic,” Strong says of his approach to playing real people. “You are trying to render with a certain level of exactitude this person, their behavior. In Roy’s case, the way he spoke, the way he carried himself physically. It involved some physical transformation in terms of losing weight and changing my appearance.”
Still, Strong adds, “That stuff is all, in a way, cosmetic. The real thing you grapple with is trying to understand where they’re coming from and trying to inhabit their struggle, and fight their fight. You have to check your judgments at the door and be interrogated simply on a humanistic level. With this, it was peering into the heart of darkness.”
Stan underwent more of a physical, external transformation to play Trump, He gained weight (about 25 pounds) and wore prosthetics, but in the end, he and Abbasi opted for a “less is more” approach.
“For a while, we were getting closer to shooting and we hadn’t agreed on the prosthetics. And that’s when Ali said, ‘Look, maybe you should start gaining weight in your face because you’re older now, so your cheeks are more hollow, and it’s not Marvel,’” Stan says with a laugh. So, he called a nutritionist, who advised that he eat ramen with extra soy sauce to help puff up his face with the extra sodium.
“This is a movie about two human beings, not about two villains or monsters, and I don’t think the movie attempts to vilify these people,” Strong says. “I think it attempts to understand where they came from and how they became who they are. It’s a movie about the making of Donald Trump, which is, in my feeling, imperative and mandatory viewing for anyone in this country affected by his leadership, which is everyone.”
“I think there is value to normalizing people that we feel strongly about, and people feel very strongly about [Trump] in two different extremes,” Stan adds. “They think he’s either God’s son or Lucifer incarnate, and I think we need to bring him back down to earth in the hope of understanding.”
“I hope he sees the movie,” Strong says of Trump. “I actually don’t think he would, but I think there’s a lot in it that he would recognize. And I think there’s nothing really in this movie that he hasn’t acknowledged and even bragged about at some point or another. I hope he sees it — that would alone be worth making it.”
“Hopefully, this movie leads people towards a reconnection with their own humanity,” Stan says. “I think we have to nurture empathy, and that’s at stake now more than ever it feels like. And the only way to do that is sometimes to confront it with its opposite. And we have to be aware of the things in the dark as much as we are of the things in the light.”
Read our full cover story on The Apprentice, in theaters Oct. 11.