Entertainment Weekly – Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong take EW inside the making of a film so controversial, no major Hollywood studio would touch it.

Sebastian Stan didn’t become Donald Trump until the helicopter took off.

Moments earlier, before the rotor blades whirled, director Ali Abbasi was getting nervous. After five years of preparation and delays, the Iranian Danish filmmaker was finally rolling on what would become this year’s most controversial film, the Trump origin story The Apprentice (in theaters Oct. 11). But when he looked at his star sitting across from Jeremy Strong in character as Trump’s notorious mentor, Roy Cohn, he had a sinking feeling something wasn’t right.

“I was looking at them like, ‘Wow, they look weird, man. Is this going to work?'” Abbasi tells Entertainment Weekly a year later, from Copenhagen. “Then the chopper starts lifting, and I’m like, ‘Well, I guess I’m going to find out.'”

Once they were in the air, a transformation occurred that neither Abbasi nor the actors can fully explain. “Suddenly, it started to work,” the director says. “And I thought, ‘If it’s working here, it’s probably going to work on the ground, too.'”

“Until you cross that Rubicon, there’s a certain measure of dread and uncertainty,'” says Strong, sitting next to Stan at their EW cover shoot last month. “So that, compounded with the fact that we were up in the air precariously in a helicopter, being buffeted around by the wind, was a fitting first day.”

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