It’s the noise living in all of our heads—when we turn on the news, scroll through Elon Musk’s X, or listen to any number of podcasts. Donald Trump’s voice even forced its way into awards season with The Apprentice, which fictionalizes the president’s ascent in the New York City real estate scene in the 1970s and ’80s. Despite a long and difficult battle for distribution, the film earned a pair of Oscar nominations: one for Sebastian Stan’s lead performance as Trump, and the other for Jeremy Strong’s supporting turn as his shadowy mentor, Roy Cohn.
Stan’s performance is made not just by his sideswept blonde wig and perpetually pouted lips, but his total mastery of Trump’s idiosyncratic diction. For that, we can thank dialect coach Liz Himelstein, who has devoted her life to helping performers find characters through accent. That means phonetically breaking down dialogue—every vowel, diphthong, and consonant change—in addition to giving her high-profile clients primary source material they can study.
The key to Stan’s transformation turned out to be Trump’s 1980 conversation with gossip columnist Rona Barrett. “In that interview, we found so much of him,” Himelstein tells Vanity Fair, speaking in the soothing, perfectly enunciated tone one would expect from a person who teaches accents for a living. “It was a treasure trove of sounds and cadence, and also [Trump] being 34 years old, his younger voice.”
As Stan previously told VF, in the appearance, Trump “speaks very quickly, very passionately, very eloquently, persuasively even—well-thought-out, running sentences”—with a lot more coherence than he manages these days. At this point in his story, Trump also had yet to develop his signature braggadocio. “He was slightly shy with Rona. I mean very slightly,” says Himelstein. “But with the tutelage of Roy Cohn, he felt like he could be a little bit bigger and much more confident.”
Trump’s speaking style has changed over the years, partly due to his age. But Himelstein also sees another shift: “I think that he, in some ways, became a parody of himself. The way that he says things has gotten certain reactions. So he goes right for those types of phrases. He’s definitely not that fast-talking, thinking-ahead human being that he used to be in his 30s, and I think that he’s lost some language skills if you really listen to him.” His current audience often focuses more on how he speaks than what he says, I offer. “Exactly,” she replies. “‘They’re eating the dogs and the cats,’ all of that—you’d never hear that in a 1980s Donald.”
While working with Stan, Himelstein wrote out all of the dialogue from the Barrett interview, as well as some of Trump’s early appearances with Oprah Winfrey and Mike Wallace, and had the actor memorize it. She also gave Stan audio from Fred Trump, who passed his Queens, New York, accent down to his son Donald. Both Stan and Himelstein spent months with Trump’s voice in their ear—and saw the lines between the two men blurring in the process. “As we kept working and working and working, when we’d go back to some of the interviews, it would seem to me like Trump was imitating Sebastian,” says Himelstein. “The tables had turned. God, He almost sounds like you,” she remembered thinking. “We could not believe it.”
Himelstein’s more than three-decade career in Hollywood dates back to 1990’s Cry-Baby, a musical romantic comedy from John Waters starring a then fresh-faced Johnny Depp. She got her start teaching theater students at SUNY Purchase and Carnegie Mellon before bringing her talent to a crop of young screen actors who needed to nail a Baltimore accent. Himelstein’s filmography is teeming with equally compelling credits, from The Big Lebowski to Man of Steel. She’s coached everyone from Mike Myers’s Cat in the Hat to Emma Stone’s Billie Jean King. She is an “absolute ninja” at teaching performers the Minnesotan accents in 1996’s Fargo and its subsequent TV spinoff. And her expertise often gets her repeat clients like Naomi Watts, Margot Robbie, Andrew Garfield, and, most prolifically, Nicole Kidman, with whom she’s worked on 24 projects to date—spanning from 1996’s The Portrait of a Lady to 2021’s Nine Perfect Strangers.
Before The Apprentice, Himelstein had already coached Stan for his roles as two other larger-than-life characters: Tonya Harding’s Oregon-accented ex-husband Jeff Gillooly in I, Tonya and California-bred rocker Tommy Lee in Pam & Tommy. “Sebastian went to drama school at Rutgers. He had taken voice and speech class; he understood the mechanics. And that was really wonderful because we could just jump right into it,” says Himelstein. “Sebastian, always with everything we’ve ever worked on, is so committed, works beyond anything you could imagine, and has a marvelous ear. So it’s always a very exciting process working with him.”
Her established relationship with Stan sold Himelstein on The Apprentice—as did her strong belief in its creative team, director Ali Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman (who is also a Vanity Fair special correspondent). “I didn’t feel any nervousness at all. I loved the script. It was so brilliant, so well-written,” she says. The filmmakers explained their approach to her this way: “We’re going to do a little bit of rock and roll.” Says Himelstein, “I was ready for it. And as you can see, it’s not a Lifetime movie, right?”
That it is not. The Apprentice contains several controversial scenes, including a graphic sequence in which Trump gets liposuction and a scalp reduction, and another where Stan’s character sexually assaults Maria Bakalova’s Ivana in their Trump Tower apartment. (Twenty-five years after alleging in a divorce-court deposition that her then husband had raped her in 1989, Ivana recanted some of her sworn testimony, including the alleged assault, during Trump’s first presidential run. Trump has denied the allegation.) In order to ground those scenes, Stan listened to little but Trump’s vocals for months.
“Almost every single day, no matter where he was, he was sending voice memos so that I could listen and then text him back any notes. He was on it all the time,” says Himelstein. “I cherish those voice memos now. He stayed in it, and as soon as we walked onto set, he was just absolutely in it. In fact, one day he said, ‘I hope I’ll be able to get out of it when the time comes.’”
Himelstein and Stan practiced dialogue from the script, but also had to prepare for the possibility of improvisation. “So not only do we have to have all of the sounds right and the cadence and the rhythms and the voice, but Sebastian had to have new words to say just in case,” says Himelstein. She later sends me a voice memo of Stan’s research-based riffing for a scene in which Trump implores then New York City mayor Ed Koch to allow construction of Trump Tower. In the recording, Stan rambles on about the “deal of the century,” throwing out comparisons to Atlantic City and the Taj Mahal.
And then there is the pouty way Trump’s mouth looks as words come out of it. “We explored, ‘Wait a minute, why are his lips slightly coming forward?’” says Himelstein. “And I’m going to say slightly because, of course, in the Saturday Night Live version [of Trump], they’re really protruding the lips in order to make a specific sound—like ooh or wuh or puh or buh. We broke it down in that way so that it really was organic, why he needed to protrude his lips for that specific sound.”
She gives props to Alec Baldwin and Trevor Noah for their impressions of Trump. But Himelstein’s top honors go to Austin Nasso, a comedian who often shares his Trump impersonation on social media.
The key to mastering Trump’s voice is nailing its cadence and proper stress, says Himelstein, as well as Trump’s all-important Queens accent. “Many people will try to be more standard and sophisticated, but he absolutely owns those Queens sounds. Some people try to get away from that, but you really can’t,” says Himelstein. “You’ve got to commit to them.” Trump has held onto his hometown inflections even as his profile has grown globally—which Himelstein thinks may be intentional. “I think that’s why lots of people connect with him. He’s a regular guy. Also, it’s tough, this accent,” she says. “He absolutely owns it and lives in it, and in that way it’s very authentic.”
Himelstein may have had her fill of based-on-a-true-story narratives. In 2023 alone, she worked on George & Tammy, White House Plumbers, Oppenheimer, Rustin, Nyad, Priscilla, Dumb Money, and The Iron Claw. When we speak, she’s calling me from the Los Angeles set of her next project: season three of Ryan Murphy’s Monster anthology series, which stars Charlie Hunnam as serial killer Ed Gein and features Tom Hollander as Alfred Hitchcock.
When asked to name her most challenging title to date, though, Himelstein has an easy answer: 2022’s Babylon, an Old Hollywood epic from filmmaker Damien Chazelle in which Himelstein worked with Margot Robbie to play the boisterous aspiring actress Nellie LaRoy. “Damien wasn’t quite sure of the accent that he wanted for this character, so he wanted us to explore everything,” says Himelstein. “We literally went through the phonetic map of the United States,” she says, with stops in Pittsburgh, upstate New York, the Midwest, Texas, Georgia, Florida, California, and Montana.
About a dozen voice memos from Robbie later—“talk about a brilliant ear,” says Himelstein—Chazelle finally decided he wanted Nellie to come from his home state of New Jersey. But when Himelstein presented the filmmaker with period-accurate accents from the Garden State, Chazelle pushed back. “He challenged us to look beyond the norm, and we found this great modern sound,” says Himelstein. “I always say the directors and actors teach me so much.”
Last year, Himelstein worked on season three of The White Lotus—primarily with Parker Posey. Himelstein first met when Posey when she was her drama school student. “18-year-old Parker arrived at SUNY Purchase with her Mississippi accent. I remember she came to the audition and was, of course, enchanting,” Himelstein says. “When she walked out, the faculty looked at me and said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘Get her in here immediately! She’s a star.’”
Under Himelstein, Posey learned Shakespearean English and the Standard American English required for roles like the cold-hearted upper Manhattan editor she played in in You’ve Got Mail and her warped Jackie-O in The House of Yes. The pair briefly crossed paths on HBO’s The Staircase in 2022, where Himelstein shaped the British Colin Firth’s distinctive American accent. But with The White Lotus, Posey “finally got to be Southern” once more. At the request of series creator Mike White, expect Posey’s character, Victoria, and her husband, Timothy, played by Englishman Jason Isaacs, to have thicker North Carolinian drawls than their children (Sam Nivola and Sarah Catherine Hook)—“because as in real life,” says Himelstein, “the parents usually have a much stronger accent.”
Himelstein’s dance card remains full. She coached Gal Gadot to craft “an international sound” for her Evil Queen in Disney’s upcoming live-action Snow White. Then, after working with Ewan McGregor on 2017’s live-action Beauty and the Beast, she reunites with director Bill Condon for another splashy musical adaptation—Kiss of the Spider Woman. “Jennifer Lopez—what a joy,” says Himelstein, calling her “the greatest student of dialect one could ask for.” The multihyphenate was dogged in her pursuit of a mid-Atlantic standard accent. “I always say good speech feels good,” says Himelstein. “Just enjoying the consonants and the vowels and really being able to articulate feels good.”