Vanity Fair -With an uncanny performance as a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice and an even less recognisable turn in A Different Man, the shapeshifting actor is embracing his freaky side.
“If you’re indicted, you’re invited,” Jeremy Strong’s Roy Cohn says in The Apprentice, a new film directed by Ali Abbasi and written by Vanity Fair special correspondent Gabriel Sherman.
The movie charts the rise of a young Donald Trump, as played by Sebastian Stan, across 1970s and ’80s New York. And Cohn’s credo was true for at least one person who attended the film’s New York premiere, held in Midtown’s DGA Theater—not far from some Trump properties. A denim-clad Michael Cohen, who was Trump’s political fixer decades after the mogul’s allegiance to Cohn had evaporated—and before he became one of the former president’s chief legal adversaries—was there at the request of Sherman, whom Cohen knew from his days “representing Mr. Trump and protecting him media-wise,” he told Vanity Fair. Cohen first learned about the film when a news outlet asked him to comment on it, mistaking him with Strong’s Cohn.
Cohen, who once declared he “would take a bullet” for Trump, later pleaded guilty to charges including campaign finance violations connected to a payment he made to the porn star Stormy Daniels. He served more than a year in prison, then testified against his former boss earlier this year. So he knows a thing or two about getting on the former president’s shit list. “If you put out a movie like this, you automatically become his enemy,” Cohen said of The Apprentice. “Now, you’re not gonna be top on the list—say, as myself or several other people—but you’ll still be on that list. And I assure you: Whether you’re number one or number 1,000 or number 10,000, you don’t wanna be on that list, because he will not stop. He will use every day that he’s still on this planet breathing in order to exact revenge on those that upset him.” (Nevertheless, Cohen said a project about his own time in Trump’s orbit is “possibly in the works.”)
The Apprentice will be released domestically on October 11—a mere 25 days before the 2024 election and, as Stan pointed out on the red carpet, on Trump’s father Fred’s birthday. VF was on hand with exclusive photos of the post-premiere afterparty, held at The Nines.
Months after it premiered to acclaim at May’s Cannes Film Festival, no distributor wanted to touch the film. Perhaps that’s because Trump’s campaign threatened legal action against the project, with chief spokesman Steven Cheung calling the “garbage” film “pure fiction” that doubled as “election interference by Hollywood elites.” On The Daily Show this week, though, Jon Stewart declared that Trump should just be “flattered” that Stan is playing him in the movie. Stan was happy for the shout-out: “Jon Stewart is a really smart, kind man,” he told VF. “He’s pretty good-looking himself, so I appreciate it.”
While Trump’s lawsuit has yet to materialize, its looming possibility scared most distributors away from The Apprentice, before Briarcliff Entertainment and Rich Spirit stepped in at the end of August. “As a journalist…the goal is to tell the story, and you don’t back down if somebody is unhappy with it,” Sherman said. “But in Hollywood, the fear of controversy or a lawsuit—the producers and the executives at the studio just feel like it’s too risky to make that into a movie. That was a big wake-up call for me.”
The gravity of releasing a Trump story in the city that made him was palpable for Strong. “Honestly, it’s kind of chilling,” he told VF. “I passed Trump Tower on the way here.”
Though the Emmy winner has appeared in several other historically based films, including Selma, The Big Short, and The Trial of the Chicago 7, “none of them have quite the resonance and real-world ramifications that this does,” he said. “The world is on fire and the stakes are so high. They’ve maybe never been higher at this moment in our democracy.” He then quoted Chicago Sun-Times journalist Sydney Harris: “History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done.” The Apprentice hopes to reveal the truth behind Trump’s bluster. “This is an attempt to peel away the disguise a bit, and show you the playbook, and show you the sort of puppet master behind the guy.”
Strong didn’t mince words when asked about studying Cohn, who’s best known for being Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during his midcentury anti-Communist crusade. “Roy’s legacy is a legacy of shamelessness, mendacity, lies, dissimulation, brutality, and winning as the only moral measure,” the actor told VF. “But he also, like, had a bedroom full of stuffed-frog figurines and a Mickey Mouse sign on his door that said ‘Roy.’ He had a kind of guileless innocence and charm at the same time as he was a lethal, brutal, ruthless, savage, remorseless person. So I’ve never quite seen that polarity in one person before.” Because Cohn has “been demonized in our culture…it’s worth having a full picture of him. We can’t dismiss him or simply say, ‘Oh, he’s just a monster.’”
The film made early waves for gasp-inducing scenes in which Trump gets liposuction, undergoes a scalp reduction, and, in a fit of anger, violently rapes his first wife, Ivana Trump. (Trump has denied the events depicted in the scenes, and though Ivana accused Trump of rape during her divorce deposition, she recanted the claim in 1993.) Maria Bakalova, who plays Ivana in the film and wore an ensemble inspired by her character to the premiere, is glad that moment made it into the movie. “It’s important to present [the scene] with respect and dignity because women like her are survivors,” the actor told VF. “It takes a lot of courage to speak about this. It takes a lot of courage to say it out loud.”
“Unfortunately, even now, right at this moment that we’re having this conversation, there is a woman going through something like this,” she added. “It’s our duty to shine a light.”
Speaking of Trump’s wives: The film’s New York premiere coincided with the publication of Melania Trump’s memoir. Cohen, who’s working on his third book himself, has no plans to read it: “No, none at all. I know that old story—the self-serving story.” Bakalova was more open to the idea. “I love to read books,” she said with a laugh. “So why not? Absolutely.”
Those on the Apprentice team hope audiences are similarly open to their movie, which many of them believe has been falsely labeled a “political hit piece,” as Sherman put it. Although Stan shared a brutal post-screening assessment of the real Trump—“I see someone that is just relentlessly going to go the distance at no matter what cost, and it’s the loneliest person in the world to me”—he hopes people of all political beliefs “experience the film,” the actor told VF. “If you don’t like it, walk out, or maybe enjoy yourself, have a laugh, get angry, I don’t know, whatever. Feel. Feel something. Be a human being!”
But while the filmmakers are hopeful that Trump will watch the final product, Sherman doesn’t anticipate a glowing review. “I think because he didn’t make it, he’ll have to hate it,” says the screenwriter. “But I hope in his private moments, he recognizes something of himself in the character.”
After the first New York audience had seen the film, VF’s editor in chief, Radhika Jones, led a Q&A with those involved in the production, including actor Martin Donovan, who plays Trump’s father. Decades ago, as he revealed, he also briefly worked as a waiter at Trump Tower, although he never laid eyes on its namesake.
The audience was populated by both press and celebrities, including Laverne Cox and Anne Hathaway. The latter giggled after her close friend Strong compared working on The Apprentice to “Philippe Petit walking across the [World] Trade Center on the wire,” referring to “the level of risk involved and how badly you could just crash and burn,” which he noted were aspects of the project that “drew us towards it.”
Beyond Cohen, at least one more former Trump henchman was drawn in by the film as well. Shortly before the premiere, Roger Stone tweeted that Strong’s portrayal of his old friend Cohn “is uncanny in it’s accuracy.” (For what it’s worth, Stone did not comment on his own presence in the film, which includes a scene in which a Speedo-clad Stone refills Cohn’s cocktail as the older lawyer bakes in a tanning bed.) “No matter what your partisan background is, people are finding the humanity in these characters,” said Sherman from the stage.
As a Danish Iranian, Abassi has an outsider’s perspective of the American political system. “When you’re in the Middle East, it’s almost like you’re living downstream from this palace and the sewage goes through where you live,” the director explained during the Q&A. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an environmentally conscious king—the shit’s gonna go down there anyways…. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Democratic president or Republican president—we’re gonna get the short end of the stick anyway.”
But while most filmmakers might not center their first English-language project on such divisive themes, Abbasi doesn’t find his film to be controversial. “It’s fun to be riding on the back of the dragon,” said the man who was bold enough to stay at the Trump International Hotel & Tower ahead of the premiere.
Americans may be less enthused about diving into another Trump-centric tale. “We’re so inundated with information about Donald Trump,” Sherman said. “We all become inured and numb to the actual details of his behavior. What this film hopefully can do is make people actually experience and feel it on an emotional level—to actually spend physical time and space with these characters. As Ali says, it shouldn’t be controversial…. I hope that this film makes people sit in a quiet, dark theater and look with their own eyes at the behavior of the man that we might elect to be the next president.”
By the premiere’s conclusion, the film had already elicited a few reactionary responses. Toward the end of the panel, an audience member, who worried that Trump could “get elected because Sebastian Stan is attractive,” shared his unfiltered, unprompted takeaway: “I think people should see this movie and realize that that motherfucker should not be the fucking president.”
Then there was Cohen, who couldn’t help but whisper commentary about one particular scene during the screening. In the film, Cohn spends his final birthday before he dies of AIDS with Trump, who gives his ailing friend a pair of gold cufflinks with “Trump” emblazoned on them. “He gave me those too!” Cohen audibly told his seatmate. When asked whether he ever wears them, the former attorney had a quick reply: “Of course not.”