Screen Captures > Web Videos > ‘The Apprentice’ Press Tour > Parade
Category: Interviews
Feb
07
Sebastian Stan was approached to play Donald Trump in The Apprentice back in 2019, during the US president’s first term in office. Back then, the Romania-born Stan, who moved to the US aged 12, was best known as Bucky Barnes — aka the Winter Soldier — in several Marvel movies, including Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and starring in indies such as I, Tonya.
“The great casting director Carmen Cuba called me and said, ‘There’s this incredible filmmaker, Ali Abbasi. You should see his film Border. He wants to do a film called The Apprentice, about the early days of Donald Trump and his relationship with Roy Cohn,’” recalls Stan. “This was before the pandemic, before January 6, so I was fascinated to hear his point of view. Having a European background myself, I was curious to hear how this international filmmaker would approach this American story.”
Beginning in early-1970s New York, when Trump was still working for his real-estate mogul father, The Apprentice details the aspiring property tycoon’s dream of turning a broken New York City into a thriving metropolis, his relationship with controversial lawyer Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong), who helped to make it a reality, and his first marriage.
“I remember being surprised by the script,” says Stan, who previously played real-life rocker Tommy Lee in Pam & Tommy and ice skater Tonya Harding’s husband Jeff Gillooly in I, Tonya. “I was also disturbed by how relatable things in the script seemed to be. From a film-buff’s perspective, it reminded me, thematically, of films like The Godfather Part II and Midnight Cowboy, but at the centre was this very current, prominent figure.”
Stan admits to having some apprehension about saying yes, but mostly about the audience’s stomach for “a story about this figure who has been so divisive, so loved and so hated, in an obsessive fashion. How do you offer a fresh perspective on someone who is in our lives on a minute-to-minute basis? How do you get somebody to spend two hours to look at this person and do it in a way that’s believable? Obviously, so much happened later, so then it became a question of, ‘Well, is this even safe?’”
Stan is alluding to comments made by Trump about the film, which the actor has previously said could inspire violence, although he says nobody on his team told him not to make the film.
“But the questions were different than on some other roles — ‘What is this movie bringing into your life?’ and, ‘Should a movie be told about this person?’ There was a CEO of a studio, at a dinner, who advised me not to do it because I was going to ‘alienate my audience’. I remember him telling me somebody like Hugh Jackman could do something like this, ‘But what are you doing when you’re still trying to establish your career?’”
At the time, Stan was on social media but eventually left. “I’ve had people say, ‘Are you going to look behind your back?’ But I’ve always had a very interesting relationship with fear. I grew up in a fear mentality in Romania with my parents, who were fighting against the communist system. I’ve also faced a lot of situations growing up in different countries where fear was always part of life. I would never want to be making decisions from a place of fear, so didn’t want to let that be the dominating factor in any way.”
Deep dive
Stan nails Trump’s voice, walk, mannerisms and, with the aid of prosthetics, physicality, but his performance never feels like an impersonation or caricature. “I did my diligence,” he says. “I read The Art Of The Deal, which he quote/unquote wrote, and various other biographies. I went back in time, [reading] every interview from the ’70s, trying to track where it all started, mixed with this very technical work of exposing myself to continuous footage and documentaries and audio, until things such as mannerisms, intonations, inflections, lips, ways of talking, certain repetitions of words, became second nature because I’d been practising it obsessively — like an instrument.”
The US president called the filmmakers “human scum” on his social network site, but Stan insists: “This was never meant to be a total hit on Trump. To some extent, it does him the most justice, which is why I find it interesting when responses about the film are always so negative, because I go, ‘Somebody took the time to look at your life and give you the benefit of the doubt, to some extent.’”
Indeed, The Apprentice paints its subject as something of a visionary in terms of his desire to regenerate New York. “There were very forward-thinking ideas, trying to bring business back, change Manhattan, bring tourism back,” says the 42-year-old actor. “But obviously there is deep anger, rage and a great deal of revenge motivating a lot of decision-making.”
Stan and Strong have been rewarded with Bafta and Oscar nominations for best actor and best supporting actor respectively — the first for both men — and Stan also won the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy actor for his other current awards contender, Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man.
“It’s been such an uncertain journey, trying to get this movie made,” says Stan. “Wrapping on February 1, 2024, premiering at Cannes, and having one of our producers try to stop the release, the premiere in Cannes, then not knowing if we could find anybody willing to [release it].”
Briarcliff Entertainment distributed the film in North America last October, just before Trump’s re-election, where it grossed a mild $4m — but success in foreign markets takes the worldwide total to $17m. “To get to any nominations whatsoever was validating and gratifying,” says Stan. “To be talking about the Academy Awards and the Baftas, which is something I’ve only dreamt of, is surreal.”
Next is Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, but Stan also has several indie movies planned, including Fjord with Romanian director Cristian Mungiu and co-star Renate Reinsve, which will allow the actor to speak his native tongue. “I made a conscious choice in about 2018 — after I, Tonya — that I wanted to continue to explore projects that are challenging but also ask questions I’m not sure I know the answer to. I love comedies, I love action movies, but I’m also interested in going into those uncomfortable places with filmmakers I respect.”
Stan points to the films of Sidney Lumet as an example of what he admires and aspires to make. “You want to be part of a movie that stands the test of time and continues to offer something,” he says. “Network is still applicable today. Dog Day Afternoon. Those are the kind of films I grew up on. I’ve wanted to find that in a way, and, for some reason, these are the films” — he is talking about Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya, Mimi Cave’s Fresh, A Different Man and The Apprentice — “that have found me. I would love to keep being at the forefront of these conversations that are not afraid to go to the core of what seem to be the issues of the times.”
To say that Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, stars of The Apprentice, have been riding a rollercoaster together would be something of an understatement. From sleepless nights contemplating embodying a young Donald Trump and his mentor Roy Cohn, to a Cannes Film Festival premiere filled with high hopes, a cease and desist from Trump himself, deafening silence from U.S. distributors, a reprieve from Briarcliff Entertainment, a highly combustible release on the eve of the U.S. Presidential election, and now an Oscar nomination each, they might well be suffering from whiplash.
Here, they met with Deadline to discuss how they’ve navigated the ride of the past few months, where they feel the film lives in the public consciousness, and what it means to them to receive Oscar nominations in the current political climate, for playing the President and his early collaborator Cohn.
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Indiewire – The surprise Golden Globe winner tells IndieWire why the industry remains “apprehensive” about his Donald Trump role and about new indie projects with Mungiu and Justin Kurzel.
If you don’t watch Marvel movies, then you don’t know Bucky Barnes, which means you only know Sebastian Stan as the also-indie actor behind films like 2024’s “A Different Man” and “The Apprentice.” Both movies have put him in the awards race, and possibly the Oscar running, especially after his grimly funny, pathos-spiked turn as a self-loathing, out-of-options actor with neurofibromatosis in Aaron Schimberg’s “A Different Man” won him a surprise Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy. That night, he was also nominated for Best Actor in a Drama for “The Apprentice,” where he plays a ’70s New York-era Donald Trump.
Had scheduling gone a different path, he would’ve starred in Brady Corbet’s also-Oscar-contending “The Brutalist,” but Stan had plenty on his plate last year and into this one, setting him up for his biggest awards season run yet. His transformative Trump performance in director Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice” has been celebrated since the film‘s 2024 Cannes premiere. Top distributors shunned the film until rookie releaser Briarcliff Entertainment got on board in August 2024, billionaire investor Dan Snyder tried to wrangle creative control and block the release, and, eventually, Stan’s peers declined the chance to speak with the American-Romanian actor in Variety’s popular Actors on Actors series, a major platform for awards contenders. Stan has been candid about not finding a sparring partner for the publication’s viral program. Why not? People don’t want to go near a movie about the incumbent president, including American audiences ($4 million domestic).
Speaking with IndieWire over the phone, Stan said that once he went public with why he wasn’t participating in Actors on Actors, “A lot of friends called me and said, ‘Hey let’s go do this together.’ That was obviously very thoughtful and very kind, but for us, Ali, Jeremy [Strong, who plays lawyer Roy Cohn], that was nothing really new.” (Last November, Variety’s editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh told IndieWire, “We invited [Stan] to participate in ‘Actors on Actors,’ the biggest franchise of awards season, but other actors didn’t want to pair with him because they didn’t want to talk about Donald Trump.”)
Stan continued, “We had been facing that kind of a thing since Cannes, whether it had even been photo shoots promoting the film, or certain people that were like, ‘We don’t want to go near this.’ Every interview since Cannes, we’ve been asked, ‘How’s the reception been? Why do you think studios are apprenehsive?’ This is sadly the reality. We have a lot of people who love this film or say they do, but when it comes down to jumping in the fire a little bit … hesitancy is understandable, to some extent.”
While understanding the emotional component around not wanting to see a movie about a leader and convicted felon who is on TV every second of the news day, Stan said, “However, around hesitancy, there’s also a slippery slope toward indifference, and that complements fear. That’s the only distinction we have to keep trying to make. You can rightfully own, ‘Hey, this isn’t for me,’ or ‘I don’t want to go there.’ But in terms of ‘I’m too worried, I’m too scared, I don’t want to get in hot water,’ then it’s like, what’s the next thing that becomes OK to not want to deal with it because it’s uncomfortable? We didn’t understand what was so uncomfortable about the movie.”
“The Apprentice” received mixed reviews at Cannes, though I remember in my festival screening being surrounded by European journalists laughing their heads off because they see Trump as a comic figure. Many Americans do not, and with “The Apprentice,” we don’t yet have the benefit of hindsight because we’re still living in the Trump era.
“Usually what happens is you look at movies like ‘Nixon’ or the movie ‘Downfall,’ which is about Hitler, [the movies] happen years later. We’ve had time to process our emotions about it, and we’ve had some distance so we can go back and look at what went wrong or what we [believed] at the time,” Stan said. “You don’t have that luxury [with ‘The Apprentice’]. We don’t have the luxury of not dealing with this person.”
Going back to his moment winning the Globe for “A Different Man,” it’s been a mixed blessing for double nominee Stan.
“There was this unbelievable kind of moment at the Globes that I never really thought was ever going to happen, and you have a brief moment of that, and suddenly, anything can flip,” he said of L.A. going into panic mode right after the Globes amid the ongoing wildfires in Southern California. “In terms of Mother Nature… at the end of the day, it really is just people. We’re all in the same boat there. There’s nothing to differentiate or anything. We are all pretty much in the same boat.”
After he’s finished with awards season duties, Stan expects to head to Europe in March to film the new film from Palme d’Or-winning auteur Cristian Mungiu, which brings the “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” filmmaker’s usual moral ambiguity into a real-life case of abuse in Romania. He’ll be reuniting with “A Different Man” star Renate Reinsve for the film, which will shoot in Romanian, English, and Norwegian.
“With all of these smaller indies, I always feel even while I’m on the plane going there, I’m always worried, ‘Is the financing going to come through? It’s on its way,” Stan said. “He’s been up there with me for a few years with filmmakers from Romania where I’ve been calling him trying to find a way to work with him, where I can speak Romanian as well. We finally found this story, which is about a Romanian family who’s moved to Norway and then ends up in this very complicated trial. There’s a system [that] investigates cases if there’s ever been physical abuse in the household between the parents or the kids. They go investigating the family for an incident, and it leads to this trial. It happened before the pandemic, and it became national news. There were a lot of religious communities that came to their side, and it’s really interesting and quite complicated.”
Stan has also been instrumental in shepherding the next film from Australian “The Order” director Justin Kurzel, “Burning Rainbow,” about a true Waco-style FBI standoff that brought down a pro-marijuana campground in Michigan a week before 9/11. He’s attached to star in the story of Tom Crosslin and Rolland Rohm, a gay couple defending their land amid police investigations linked to a Rainbow Farm festival-associated killing and their marijuana plants.
“They were raising a child as well,” Stan said. “They were real activists in some ways, and they were very controversial as well because they were running this Rainbow Farm, which was like the start of this Woodstock-style festival that was bringing all these people together, advocating for legalizing marijuana. It was also such a loving place. They were attracting a lot of attention from local authorities, and a lot of controversies were going on down there. It all happened before 9/11, so there are many people who don’t know this story. But I’ve known about it for six years or something. I’ve been tracking it through different evolutions, and it finally landed with Justin. I was tracking him now for two years to basically give me a chance, and finally, I think we’ve got to go and find all the other people.”
As for “The Brutalist,” Stan was announced to star in Brady Corbet’s Golden Globe Best Picture winner in 2019, but scheduling changes on “The Apprentice” interfered. (“The Brutalist” shot in early 2023; “The Apprentice” didn’t film until that fall after a few false starts.) Stan would’ve played Joe Alwyn’s role, Harry Lee Van Buren, the pompous son of Guy Pearce’s moneyed industrialist who exploits Adrien Brody’s Jewish-Hungarian architect.
“I’m glad that the timing [didn’t work out] … The difficulty of that movie is astounding. What they were able to achieve. Some of us would be attached. I was sort of the last one, but then [Corbet] started to go. Because ‘Apprentice’ kept getting pushed, those two started to overlap at one point. I wasn’t available for it, but having seen the movie, Joe is amazing in it, and I would have been too old by that point anyway. I feel like it worked out for the best. It makes total sense with Guy being his father,” Stan said.
As for how Stan’s indie roles fit into the Marvel orbit, especially as he’ll be seen in “Thunderbolts” this spring again as Bucky Barnes, he said, “If I hadn’t had so many opportunities with Marvel with that character alone and creatively what I got to do, I don’t know if I would have been as driven to go in this other direction as well and try to find things that I’m not always at the top of mind for. I believe, like Brady Corbet, films are a directors’ medium. It is about the filmmaker. We have to trust the filmmakers. The best films to me, in my experiences, were with really strong directors with these strong points of view. It’s been amazing to watch Brady. I was attached to that film for a long time, going back to 2019, so I’ve known of that movie and have known Brady since we were kids auditioning. I would see him at casting calls, him and his mom. Even watching him up there on Sunday felt like I’d been weirdly attached to that story as well.”
Note: You can find the screencaps of the video version of the podcast (on spotify) here: Variety – Awards Circut Podcast [Screen Captures]
When Sebastian Stan greets you, there’s an earnest warmth in his voice that makes you forget, even for a moment, the intensity of the roles he’s embodied this past year. The 41-year-old actor is riding high on a wave of critical acclaim for his two vastly different but equally daring performances in “The Apprentice” and “A Different Man,” which earned him double Golden Globe nominations — a feat last achieved by Ryan Gosling in 2016.
This past year, Stan has proven, yet again, why he’s one of the most transformative actors working today. From donning prosthetics and exploring themes of self-acceptance in “A Different Man” to stepping into the psyche of one of the most polarizing figures in modern history for “The Apprentice,” Stan’s ability to disappear into a role is matched only by his determination to tell complicated stories, no matter the fallout.
If “A Different Man” was a personal exploration, “The Apprentice” was a social experiment. Directed by Ali Abbasi, the film is a biographical character study of a young Donald Trump, focusing on his formative years and the traits that would eventually define his presidency. For Stan, stepping into Trump’s skin was not just an artistic challenge but a minefield of public and industry scrutiny.
“This film has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Stan tells Variety‘s Awards Circuit Podcast. “Not just because of the complexities of playing Trump, but because of the reaction it provokes.”
From the controversy surrounding its financier to the polarized reception tied to its release during an election year, “The Apprentice’s” journey to the screen was riddled with obstacles.
Stan is refreshingly candid about the hesitance he faced within Hollywood, both during the film’s production and in its aftermath. “I had people telling me not to do it,” he recalls. “They said it might alienate people, that I didn’t look like him, that it was too dangerous. But for me, acting is about going toward the uncomfortable… about trying to understand humanity, even in the darkest places.”
He carefully clarifies that “The Apprentice” isn’t about sympathizing with Trump but understanding him. “I think people interpret understanding as an attempt to sympathize, and that’s not the goal here. The film asks: would you trust this man? Would you put your life in his hands?”
Stan’s deep dive into Trump’s psyche revealed something even darker than he anticipated. “He’s given people permission to lose their humanity — to behave in ways they wouldn’t have before. And that’s what scares me the most,” Stan says. “The opposite of love isn’t hate — it’s indifference. And I worry about the indifference we’re seeing now.”
The backlash surrounding “The Apprentice” extended even to Stan’s professional relationships. When invited to participate in Variety’s Actors on Actors series, organizers struggled to find actors willing to pair with him due to his portrayal of Trump. Stan calls it a disappointing but unsurprising moment, emblematic of the discomfort many in Hollywood feel about engaging with the film publicly.
“It’s been revealing to see how hesitant people are,” Stan says. “I’ve had people come up to me at parties, saying it’s their favorite film of the year, but when it comes to supporting it publicly, there’s silence. That part of it has been tough.”
Still, there have been bright spots. People like Paul Walter Hauser, Stan’s “I, Tonya” co-star and friend, posted publicly on social media offering to partner with him for the Actors on Actors segment. That support did not go unnoticed by Stan. “That was awesome,” Stan says with a laugh. “Paul’s someone I’ve always admired, and moments like that remind me of the camaraderie that still exists in this industry.”
With “A Different Man” and “The Apprentice” firmly establishing Stan as a fearless actor, he’s looking ahead to new challenges. He’s currently developing a film adaptation of Ed Brubaker’s graphic novel “Reckless” and working on a project with celebrated filmmaker Cristian Mungiu.
And then there’s Marvel, of course. Stan is set to reprise his role as Bucky Barnes in the upcoming “Thunderbolts.” Describing the film as a misfit-driven story in the vein of “The Breakfast Club,” Stan hints at the humor and camaraderie fans can expect. “It’s a weird group thrown together, and I think people are going to love it,” he teases.
Regarding if he’ll appear in the upcoming “Captain America” sequel: “[Filming] ‘Thunderbolts*’, let me tell you, it was a much quieter year for me because I didn’t see Anthony Mackie. So, I’ll say that. Although I miss Anthony Mackie like daily, and it’s something I don’t like to admit.”
But for now, Stan is embracing the quieter moments. Speaking before the holidays, he was focused on trying to carve out time for family and last-minute gift shopping. “I’m usually pretty good with presents,” he says with a grin. “But this year, it’s been a little out of mind. I’ll put a day aside and figure it out on the fly.”
Little did he know during this conversation that a surprise win at the Golden Globes for “A Different Man” would be in his future. And it was well deserved.
Also on this episode, the Roundtable talks about this year’s Golden Globe Awards winners and what it means for the upcoming Oscar race.
It’s an embarrassment of riches to have two transformative, awards-worthy roles in one career. But what does it mean when you have two in the same season?
Sebastian Stan finds himself this year in rarified company, including the likes of Kate Winslet, Sigourney Weaver, and Jamie Foxx, with two acclaimed lead performances in The Apprentice and A Different Man. Both films have been received warmly so far: Stan just received Best Actor nominations for both films at the Golden Globes, winning for A Different Man, while The Apprentice landed on the BAFTAs longlist in six categories, including Best Film. The industry reception is remarkable, given both films’ uphill climb with their production and distribution. A Different Man was shot in 24 days in New York at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and was delayed because of last year’s Hollywood strikes. Meanwhile, the Apprentice struggled to secure U.S. distribution after its buzzy Cannes premiere due to legal threats from Donald Trump and general hesitancy about how it tackled his early days. With all the hurdles, it would stand to reason that there is some vindication in seeing the fruits of labor pay off.