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Even if he tried, Sebastian Stan couldn’t have avoided thinking about getting not one but two Golden Globe nominations. The actor, who received bids for A Different Man and The Apprentice, was at a screening for the former the night before the announcement.
“People were just like, ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,’” he recalls on this week’s episode of Awards Magnet. “It was a very surreal experience, but I was I was very grateful to obviously even be there once. And particularly with The Apprentice, it was even maybe more surprising because I just never know what to expect with that one.”
Stan is nominated for Best Comedy/Musical Actor for his turn as an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis in A Different Man — for which he won the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin Film Festival — and for Best Drama Actor for playing a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice. He’s the first actor to score nominations in these categories since Ryan Gosling achieved it in 2012 with Crazy, Stupid, Love and The Ides of March.
While Aaron Schimberg‘s A Different Man, which Stan filmed in 2022, was delayed because of the Hollywood strikes, The Apprentice, which also netted a supporting actor bid for Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, faced an even steeper uphill battle from the beginning. The project had been in development for years before finally going into production a year ago. Detractors felt it’s too soon for a Trump film, especially in an election year. Despite getting good reviews at the Cannes Film Festival, the film, directed by Ali Abbasi, struggled to find a distributor as Trump’s team threatened legal action before Briarcliff Entertainment stepped up.
“I feel like Ali Abbasi — kind of the way he shot it and the way he’s made the film – it’s really kind of maybe the best version of what that film could have been, given all of the circumstances and the subject matter and everything,” Stan says. “So, even like both of us [nominated] was a big gratifying moment, obviously, because I feel so connected with him.”
Last month, Stan went viral after he revealed during a Q&A that he was unable to participate in our sister site Variety’s Actors on Actors because publicists did not want their clients to discuss Trump. Stan says he brought up “the Variety thing” in the Q&A to make a larger point about fear, adding that multiple distributors loved The Apprentice but were reluctant to pick it up.
“I guess there’s always been fear around movies … but this time it sort of feels obviously more raw because it’s all happening in real time. This movie is not a film that waited 10 years when we all got good and comfortable to look at [and question] choices we’ve made,” he says. “We’re being challenged to not be indifferent in a time where, for survival — mental and emotional — we’re leaning towards being indifferent. I think that’s the difficulty around it. And what we’ve been trying to talk about was that regardless of your point of view of the subject or him or whatever, or how you grew up or where you’re from, there is still the benefit of having an experience with a movie, which is what a movie is supposed to do. … You can go and have your own experience with this person for two hours, and there is an instinct there that you may have as a human being that will override whatever else.”
Earlier this month, the actor shared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that Steven Spielberg told him at the Governors Awards that he loved his performances in both films. “Other people, other actors” have expressed love and admiration for The Apprentice specifically in private to Stan, and he hopes nominations from the Golden Globes and the Independent Spirit Awards will give people “permission to just acknowledge the movie publicly.”
“Not only do we feel like it turned out the best it could have happened with what we were dealing with circumstantially, but then it does get validated when you get text messages and emails that your agents are forwarding you from people you’ve grown up with admiring that are like, ‘Hey, I just want to tell you this is my favorite thing I’ve seen,’” he says. “I don’t know if this will, in 10 years’ time, as we’ve had a moment in a distance to kind of look at it again, maybe it will be considered, but I do feel it will be talked about.”
The Hollywood Reporter – Adrien Brody, Sebastian Stan and Peter Sarsgaard bond over the pressures of delivering a standout performance: “I had a panic attack every night.”
Photoshoot: #151 –Session #151 – Beau Grealy
Former James Bond Daniel Craig, The Pianist Oscar winner Adrien Brody, Euphoria Emmy winner Colman Domingo, Marvel superhero turned Emmy nominee Sebastian Stan, consummate character actor Peter Sarsgaard and Oscar-nominated heartthrob Paul Mescal range in age from 28 (Mescal) to 56 (Craig); hail from around the world (America, England, Ireland and Romania); and forged very different paths to stardom. But they all share one thing in common: Each gave a standout performance in a 2024 film — or, in Stan’s case, two — that led to them congregating in mid-November at Soho House West Hollywood for THR‘s annual Actor Roundtable.
Their characters are unforgettable: a Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and comes to America (Brody in The Brutalist); a gay American addict in 1950s Mexico (Craig in Queer); an incarceree who finds purpose in art (Domingo in Sing Sing); an angry young man set on destroying the city that betrayed him (Mescal in Gladiator II); a TV exec who oversees live coverage of a terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics (Sarsgaard in September 5); a disfigured actor who undergoes facial reconstructive surgery (Stan in A Different Man); and a striving young Donald Trump (Stan in The Apprentice). So, too, was their conversation.
Once an actor finds his name popping up in Oscar conversations, he’s pretty much arrived in the industry, right? Actually, no, not necessarily, says Jeremy Strong, who plays unscrupulous lawyer and Donald Trump mentor Roy Cohn to much acclaim in “The Apprentice.”
“There’s a thing called ‘arrival fallacy,’ which is that the horizon is just always receding. You don’t arrive. I mean, I’ve never felt like I’ve arrived. It’s just a search, and you’re on the frontier of uncertainty and doubt, and taking risks.”
“And then the bottom falls out, and you keep looking,” adds Adrien Brody, who plays the Holocaust survivor and visionary architect at the heart of Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist.”
“That frontier just keeps moving,” Strong agrees.
Even now, with this season’s breakout performances and glowing reviews, a conversation among several actors shows they share the same fears and doubts as the rest of us.
“I don’t think I ever looked at the next job and went, ‘All right, it’s coming and here we go.’ I think it’s always just the terror of, ‘OK, I got the job. Am I going to ruin it?’ The fear of, ‘I’m wrong for it,’” says Kieran Culkin, who stars in the affecting “A Real Pain” with the film’s writer-director, Jesse Eisenberg.
These three actors — along with Peter Sarsgaard, who stars in “September 5,” about the terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics; Colman Domingo, who plays an incarcerated man who discovers the transformative power of art in “Sing Sing”; and Sebastian Stan, who not only plays the future president in “The Apprentice” with Strong but also stars in “A Different Man,” a cautionary story of inner discovery — got together last month for The Envelope Actors Roundtable moderated by Spectrum News 1 host Kelvin Washington. They shared their thoughts on auditioning, responding to fear and the hard truths of the world around us.
On Monday, Sebastian Stan pulled off a rare feat, scoring Golden Globe nominations for Lead Actor in both Drama and Musical/Comedy categories. Following the announcement, Stan got candid about upcoming projects with Cristian Mungiu, Christian Tafdrup and Justin Kurzel, his experience on the awards circuit with his nominated turn as Donald Trump in The Apprentice, and more.
In discussing his upcoming slate, Stan seemed particularly excited about a project not yet announced with Cristian Mungiu, the Romanian filmmaker behind Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which he expects to shoot next year.
“I was born in Romania. I still speak the language, and I’ve been trying to find a project where I can go back and tap back into that history that I have,” said the actor, “so I’m excited about working with him, and hopefully that’s going to come together.”
A second project on the docket is Let the Evil Go West, a horror thriller from buzzy Danish filmmaker Christian Tafdrup, which reunites him with Pam & Tommy‘s Lily James. The film centers on a railroad worker driven to madness after coming upon a fortune, and his wife, who believes an evil presence has attached itself to their family.
Stan came to the project after seeing Tafdrup’s “unbelievable” horror thriller Speak No Evil, which Universal just remade. “This is a project that’s been going on for a while, and it always gets tricky. It’s about finding the right scheduling and the right time to do it,” said the actor. “But that’s something I’m really excited about.”
While he didn’t get into details, Stan also confirmed that he’s attached to star in Burning Rainbow Farm, a film that The Order‘s Justin Kurzel has in development. Plot details are unconfirmed, but we hear it’s inspired by true events, involving two marijuana advocates who face off against the FBI in a tense five-day standoff in Michigan, culminating in tragedy just days before 9/11.
Stan’s Globe nominations this morning came for Briarcliff’s The Apprentice, which examines Trump’s rise in the 1970s and 1980s New York real estate scene, as well as A24’s A Different Man. Hailing from filmmaker Aaron Schimberg, that title has him playing a man with a disfigurement who undergoes an experimental facial reconstruction surgery, before spiraling into a psychological crisis.
RELATED: Hollywood A-Listers Afraid Of Donald Trump’s Wrath Over ‘The Apprentice’, Sebastian Stan Says
“Stunned and incredibly ecstatic,” Stan shared that the nominations are gratifying given the risks he took with each project and the uphill battles faced with each — The Apprentice, in particular, which struggled to secure financing, and later, distribution, amid the threat of a lawsuit from Trump himself. The project is one Hollywood didn’t seem to know what to do with, both leading up to and in the aftermath of a polarizing, pivotal election.
Sharing that he had “extreme trepidations” about playing Trump — in part, because many in the industry advised him not to — Stan reflected this morning about a disclosure of his that went viral: that while he intended to appear on Variety’s video series Actors on Actors in support of The Apprentice, no actor would step up to talk with him about his project, presumably out of fear of saying the wrong thing.
“For me, the Variety thing was just unfortunately another example of the uphill battle that the movie had been facing since Cannes, that there was some hesitancy and some fear around it…But it wasn’t my intention to point a finger or blame anybody else,” Stan said. “It was just simply saying, ‘Hey, we should be mindful of things that feel fearful.’ Because as artists, we have to hold ourselves as sort of the ambassadors of the truth, in a way…Today, of course, is a big day, in terms of hopefully allowing people to feel like they have permission, to talk about this film, and look at the work and have a conversation about it.”
From Stan’s perspective, we as a society need “all kinds of movies” and “have to try to not ever discriminate against any movie,” even if it’s something as polarizing as The Apprentice. In terms of the current climate of fear among Hollywood stars, when it comes to addressing certain topics, Stan’s feeling is that “there’s always a conversation that we can have about the work and what goes into it.”
A recent speech on Stan’s mind, when it comes to this, is the one given by honoree Richard Curtis at the Governors Awards. “He went up there and said, ‘Look, I am grateful to be standing up here and be recognized this evening. Buts also, I want to say, we love good ideas and we love embracing good ideas, but we also have to follow through on the action of it, even when you get to the last one-yard line, trying to get past it,’” the actor recalls. “Because I know the intentions are always good, and I believe that movies can inspire. I think they can reveal things sometimes that we have a hard time maybe understanding or communicating about in day-to-day life.”
In reflecting on the bold and diverse resume he’s carved out over the last decade-plus, Stan gave credit to his “Marvel family” for being an “incredibly supportive,” consistent presence in his life over the last 15 years, which has allowed him to “go out there and find other projects that allow me to kind of change it up and challenge myself.”
This, he says, is what he wants more than anything. “I’ve always tried to find other actors to learn from and grow from, and I want to be part of something meaningful,” Stan says, “and maybe that’s just me getting older. You want the work to have meaning and to stand for something.”
It’s hard to come up with an example of another actor who has scored lead actor nominations in both Drama and Musical/Comedy in the same year. Leonardo DiCaprio won twice in 2007, for Blood Diamond and The Departed, but both of those noms were in Lead Actor Drama. More commonly, an actor nabs one nomination in Lead and one in Supporting — for example, Kate Winslet, who did so with Revolutionary Road (Lead) and The Reader (Supporting) in 2009, winning both. Winslet also scored a pair of Globe noms in 2012 for Mildred Pierce and Carnage, though both noms were in Lead categories. Interestingly, the actress is again in the running with a pair of projects this season — those being feature Lee and series The Regime.
Other examples of multiple nominees across Lead and Supporting categories in a single year include Al Pacino (Glengarry Glen Ross & Scent of a Woman, 1993) and Jamie Foxx (Collateral & Ray, 2005). This year’s Golden Globes are set to take place on January 5.
Vanity Fair – On the heels of recognition for both The Apprentice and A Different Man, Stan speaks to Vanity Fair about his “surreal” journey to awards recognition, as well as being nominated in the same year as Pamela Anderson.
It’s not every day that an actor earns a Golden Globe nomination, much less two in the same morning. But Sebastian Stan joined the likes of Selena Gomez and Kate Winslet on Monday by getting dual 2025 Globe nominations. “It’s certainly surreal,” he tells Vanity Fair, adding he’s “still sort of shaking from it.”
Stan secured recognition for both his dramatic turn as Donald Trump in The Apprentice and his more comedic performance as a tormented aspiring actor named Edward in A Different Man. It is the first time that a male performer has pulled off double nominations in the lead acting categories since Ryan Gosling managed to do it back in 2012. “Listen, one of my favorite actors of all time,” Stan says. “I’d be very glad to be in that little stat with him.”
In the early hours of nomination morning, Stan was getting some shuteye—or, at least attempting to. “I actually woke up in the middle of the night at 4:00, and was like, Oh, okay, there’s an hour and a half. I fell asleep again, and then I got a call from my publicist,” he tells VF. Since then, “I’ve been sending a lot of pictures to my mom.”
Some excitement is to be expected, especially when considering what it took to get both of Stan’s nominated films to the screen. “I never would’ve dreamt that I was going to be going to the Globes with both of these films, I never would’ve dreamt that both of the films would’ve come out in the same year,” he says.
Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man sat in limbo for two years before debuting on the festival circuit this year. At the Sundance Film Festival, it was acquired by A24 for a fall release. The film then screened in Berlin, where Stan won the Silver Bear for best lead performance. Meanwhile, The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abbasi and written by Vanity Fair special contributor Gabriel Sherman, premiered at May’s Cannes Film Festival to positive reviews. But the film faced a treacherous road to distribution in the days before the 2024 presidential election.
“To even be in one room with both films is not something that’s ever crossed my mind,” Stan says. “So, I’ll be digesting that probably throughout the holiday season.” The recognition for each movie feels extra gratifying because “they both felt really challenging in terms of what the roles we’re requiring,” he says, “obviously one being one of the most famous people in the world, with a lot of people having very strong feelings about [him], and many, many impressions having been done. How do you go in there and find something new, or try to offer a different perspective?”
As it turns out, bringing a young Trump to life during the dawn of his fortuitous relationship with Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong, now Globe-nominated for best supporting actor in a feature film) was only half the fight. Stan recently opened up about the struggle to promote The Apprentice in the wake of Trump’s reelection, including having to pass on Variety’s Actors on Actors because other participants were reluctant to talk about the president-elect.
“The movie has had a really uphill battle since Cannes,” says Stan, who also recently nabbed an Independent Spirit Award nomination for the movie. “It’s been hard for people to have permission to express how they feel about the movie, and today feels very gratifying in terms of having the Golden Globes recognize the film, and the work. It feels like hopefully going forward people can feel okay talking about it, and see it.”
Stan earned his first Globes nomination for playing Tommy Lee in 2022’s similarly controversial based-on-a-true-story project, Pam & Tommy. How does he feel to be nominated in the same year as the real-life Pamela Anderson, who became a first-time nominee for The Last Showgirl? “I’m so happy for her, and [it’s] so well deserved. It’s a beautiful film and a beautiful performance,” says Stan. “From our end, this was always part of the goal and the intention [of the series]—to somehow shine a light where it hasn’t been shined before, and hopefully contribute in a way [to her success]. So yeah, I’m ecstatic for her.”
Stan is also rooting for many of his other fellow nominees. “My two favorite films of the year are Sing Sing and A Real Pain,” says the actor, who then praises one of his competitors in the musical/comedy lead actor race. “Jesse Eisenberg, I want to say congratulations to him because he’s somebody I worked with years ago, in 2006 [via Fred Durst’s feature directorial debut, The Education of Charlie Banks], and the man’s a genius. I love that movie so much.”
He also spotlights The Substance, a film that, along with a release date, also shares themes with A Different Man—more specifically, issues of transformation and fixation on physical appearance. “There were a lot of articles that kind of put us together, in terms of the themes of the movies,” says Stan. “But they’re unique in the sense that they are original. Sing Sing, A Real Pain, I should say Anora while I’m at it—to be able to have films that are standing on their own without any IP, or anything about them that we know but their true original film storytelling, is amazing.”
The Globes are seen as something of a precursor on the way to potential Oscar gold—but Stan isn’t getting ahead of himself. “The fact that we’re here today in itself is such a massive step, but it is very much a one-day-at-a-time experience,” says the 42-year-old. “As an actor in this community, besides the work that you do on the day, when you go home at night and feel like you’ve left it all on the field, there’s nothing more gratifying than the actual recognition of your peers. I’ve been doing this for 20-some odd years, and I’m pretty grateful. So, knock on wood, and whatever happens next happens—but we’ve already won in a major way.”
Sebastian Stan is receiving major awards buzz for two films this year. In Ali Abbasi‘s “The Apprentice,” he plays a young Donald Trump as he starts his real-estate business in 1970s and ’80s New York with the helping hand of infamous lawyer Roy M. Cohn (Jeremy Strong). In Aaron Schimberg‘s dark comedy “A Different Man,” Stan plays a disfigured aspiring actor who undergoes a radical medical procedure to transform his appearance. Stan chats with Gold Derby about both roles in the video interview above.
The actor says “fear” and his “lack of actual knowledge about this person” inspired him to take on the role of Trump. “Like everybody else, I’ve been inundated with a constant influx of information online, ‘SNL’ impressions, headlines, horrific soundbites of his, and I had maybe had my own ideas about the guy,” he explains. “I actually feel like I really didn’t know who he was, or how did he become what he became?”
“As an actor, you’re hoping to find projects that challenge you, but also truly ask very important, uncomfortable questions,” Stan says. “We’re talking about someone who has affected all of our lives. I felt there was a responsibility to really try to hold a mirror up to nature.” Stan likens his preparation for the role to “learning an instrument.” He had to master Trump’s mannerisms and speech, which were drastically different in the 1970s.
Stan reveals, “You study footage and listen to audio for hours on end. Basically it takes over your life. It takes a long time, and then eventually you can just do it in your sleep and not think about it. You want it to feel organic, and you want it to feel earned so it’s not something you’re conscious of. The caricature, the cartoon, the ‘SNL’ impression were always going to be a mountain to climb. Everyone’s got some back pocket impression of him…The margin of error for me was very small.”
The actor plays the real estate mogul and then-future president in the 1970s and 80s, and Stan explains how much Trump has changed since then. “He didn’t start out to be this character,” he says. “He’s actually been inventing himself every 10 years, arguably. It’s quite fascinating because people change, but we don’t all change that much or that drastically. He’s had very different points in his life that led him to this. The building of Trump Tower, Atlantic City was another point for him, and then really ‘The Apprentice,’ which is the version we’ve been living with. This character he’s learned pretty well and shaped in that show. For our purposes, when you go back in time, there was a guy that was really not that sure of himself.”
Stan plays another man with deep insecurities in “A Different Man.” His character, Edward, suffers from neurofibromatosis, a condition that causes tumors to grow on his face. “It was such a unique, different film,” he says. “Not just in terms of how unbelievably unpredictable the movie is. It’s funny, it’s tragic. It’s exciting for an actor and you actually feel surprised by the material.”
“There’s this underlying message of about identity and self-truth,” he continues. “Not just how it pertains to disability and disfigurement, and how we don’t really have a relationship with that at all. We are curious, but afraid to rely on our curiosity, and therefore we manage to walk away without any education or awareness about someone’s experience in those shoes. It really is about something we’re all facing now, which is, who am I? And who am I separately from how I look to other people?”
Stan stars with Adam Pearson, an actor who actually has neurofibromatosis. “It was a very tricky line to walk,” Stan says. “The prosthetics by Mike Marino were so great, that at times, people don’t even know if it’s me or him. It’s so cleverly and expertly woven together by Aaron, and it’s about what happens to this person that has denied himself for so long, and then when he thinks he gets this life he’s always wanted, he finds out that the cost he paid was his true self.”
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Los Angeles Magazine – The ‘Pam & Tommy’ star appears unrecognizable in two projects that prove he’s a master of transformation.
Note: For the accompanying photoshoot click here: Session #143 – Irvin Rivera
“I have these very vivid memories,” says 42-year-old actor Sebastian Stan of growing up in Romania during the 1989 revolution.
“One of them being this Dacia car, driving by with screaming people holding the flag. The flag had a hole in the middle, which they had cut out — [erasing] the communist symbol at the time. And then I remember being on my couch with my mom and my grandmother and neighbors, watching Ceausescu be shot.”
What propelled them was the “obsession” Eastern Europeans had with the American Dream. “All I ever heard about was America: the land of the free, the land of opportunity,” says Stan, who at 8, moved with his mother — a pianist, who named him after composer Johann Sebastian Bach — to Vienna before heading to the U.S.
“I remember coming to this country when I was 12 with my mom and seeing the big Twin Towers of New York City and feeling overwhelmed,” Stan says. “And my mom looking at me and saying: “Now you have a chance to become someone.”
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“Trump wrote about the film this morning and called us human scum,” Jeremy Strong tells me. “Which is a term that was used by Stalin and by Hitler and by Kim Jong-un and by Bolsonaro. And I find it very troubling that a man who is running in the presidential election in the United States in 2024 is using that language.”
The Apprentice is no ordinary gig. Ali Abbasi’s movie stars Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump and Strong as Roy Cohn, notoriously ruthless lawyer, in a tale of the future president’s early days hustling real estate in New York City. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that Trump reacted as he did. But the language used this week did little to counter the film’s depiction of him as an oversensitive whiner.
“So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement,” Trump yelled on Truth Social.
“I was not surprised at all,” Stan says with a wry smile. “It’s quite childish and on par with his low self-esteem. It’s interesting for us to see it. Because it validates the film in a way. If there is nothing for him in the film to worry about – if it’s all lies, as he claims – then why even take the time to do it?”
Stan and Strong do a good job of seeming relaxed about it all. The former, an unclassifiable Romanian-born performer who has thrived in everything from awkward arthouse to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, reveals a chuckling delivery that lends itself to self-deprecation. Strong, who graduated from actors’ actor to offbeat star as Kendall Roy on the TV show Succession, has a reputation for intensity, but he couldn’t be more helpful and chatty this evening. Dressed in a rollneck jumper, his neat hair and neater beard peppery grey, he speaks in complete paragraphs that have a middle between their beginning and end.
“I don’t find it unpleasant. It doesn’t even upset me,” he says of Trump’s rant. “The thing that unsettles me is his use of that phrase and the historical context in which that phrase has been used.”
Its association with fascists?
“Human scum? It’s a specific phrase that has been used by fascist dictators in the 20th century.”
The Apprentice begins with Trump, an unglamorous nonentity, collecting rent from his father’s slums during the mid-1970s. He get a whiff of more glamorous destinations after meeting Cohn, surrounded by courtiers, in a suave restaurant, while Trump is dining pathetically alone. The attorney was already notorious. He helped prosecute Ethel and Julius Rosenberg as spies and sat beside Joseph McCarthy, the Republican senator, during the United States’s anti-communist witch hunts of the early 1950s. The film posits that he helped make Trump into the relentless force he is today. Cohn’s first rule is: “Attack, Attack, Attack!” That still feels like his protege’s mantra.
I suggest that you couldn’t make up these two men. A screenwriter, if starting from scratch, would allow them a sliver more shade. Right? Strong points me towards the heroes of John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy.
“If you look at Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck it’s the same,” he says, before nodding to one of the great American acting teachers. “Stella Adler once said that you have to be as large as life. I think people in life are large. They can have outsize dimensions. These are sui-generis people. No one I’ve ever encountered or observed or studied is anything like Roy Cohn. He was bat-like, reptilian, gleeful, sun-tanned.”
These two actors have taken quite different routes to this place. Now 42, Stan arrived with his family to New York state when he was just 12 years old. In 1994, long before the MCU even existed, he had a small role in Michael Haneke’s film 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. More smallish parts helped him gain a reputation before breaking through as Bucky Barnes in Captain America: The First Avenger. He was recently superb as a man whose life takes a wrong turn after transformative facial surgery in Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man.
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It strikes me that having both an outsider’s and an insider’s perspective on the United States could be useful when preparing a film such as The Apprentice.
“Maybe. I grew up in America, so I’m very Americanised,” Stan says. “But I do remember, as a kid, my mother communicating the blessing and the curse of being presented with the opportunity in this country to become something – to make something of myself. And while that has served me and driven me, it’s also plagued me to no end. Because I never feel I’ve done enough. Ever. That describes a lot of us in this country.”
The success of Succession turned Strong from one of the business’s best-kept secrets into a source of endless fascination. Born into a working-class Boston family, he idolised the method greats as a kid. He won a scholarship to Yale to study drama but ended up switching to English. Strong continued to act and spent spells at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London, and Steppenwolf Theatre Company, in Chicago.
They are in the English capital now. The Apprentice premieres at London Film Festival the night after we speak. As a Rada hand, Strong must feel a little at home.
“It would be false of me to claim that I was really at Rada,” he says. “I went there for a sort of training programme briefly when I was in college. This was a hallowed place for me then and it remains a hallowed place for me now. I’ve always felt the National Theatre here is like the Holy Grail. I’ve worked here on and off over the years. It’s very meaningful to be here with this film and with a piece of work that I feel has something to offer the world.”
You get a sense there of his rumoured devotion to the art, but it is all delivered in a gentle, playful manner. Intensity is not really the word for the version of Strong currently in the room. Thoughtful. Focused. Engaged.
In the first decade of the century he moved from small if increasingly prestigious theatre companies to roles off Broadway. In 2008 he made his Broadway debut in a revival of A Man for All Seasons. You can see him on screen as a CIA analyst in Zero Dark Thirty and as Lee Harvey Oswald in Parkland. But Succession changed everything. The scheming, intense, sometimes pathetic Kendall Roy, initially most plausible of the competing inheritors for their father’s mantel in Succession, turned him from a vaguely familiar personality into someone who gets recognised in the 7/11 store.
“I think it’s in the eye of the beholder,” he says of fame. “It’s something that other people might experience, but it’s not really something that I experience. I’m aware that things have changed and circumstances have changed. If anything, the thing that’s changed most is the opportunity to work. I have choice, which is a real privilege. I think it’s very important to be agnostic about what we call success or failure and just keep your head to the grindstone and do your work.”
He furrows his brow and continues in characteristically measured language.
“If we start to buy into that and drink that Kool-Aid and elevate ourselves, I think that would be deleterious towards our being able to do our work, which involves being free of what anyone might think of you. And being willing to make a big fool of yourself.”
Stan went through a similar shift when he took on the role of Bucky Barnes, dark antithesis of Captain America, in the Marvel films. He will return alongside Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova and David Harbour as Red Guardian in next year’s Thunderbolts*.
“I surrendered, a while back, from trying to control any of it,” he says. “You become public property. I feel like Lee Strasberg in The Godfather: ‘This is the business we chose.’ Ha ha!”
What does Strong make of Kendall Roy? Fans of Succession had great fun debating who was the most ghastly of the family members hustling to take over Waystar Royco from Brian Cox’s profane Logan Roy. Kendall initially seems the most engaged with the business, but a clatter of bad decisions, suspicious deaths and substance abuse opened the door for others. Could Strong sympathise with this vulnerable monster?
“It’s sort of an impossible question for me to answer,” he says with a hint of a smile. “Because I never regarded him as something other than me. I never regarded him objectively. So all the things I experienced in the making of that, over seven years, were things that coursed through me. The writing. The other actors. You’re just a vessel, and you’re responding to all of those things. But you’re not apart from it and outside of it. So I don’t think of Kendall as a character. I don’t know what I think of him as. I don’t really think of him. But he lives somewhere in me. A lot of what we do is the art that hides the art.”
It hardly needs to be said that Roy Cohn, the man if not the character, does exist apart from Jeremy Strong. There is the Trump yelling on our telly and Stan’s uncannily impersonated version on the big screen. The two men must have gained some understanding of how the heck this grifting real-estate mogul rose to become the most powerful man in the world (and may do so again). Almost nobody thought it could happen until it actually happened.
“I think it’s as old as time,” Strong says. “Churchill said in 1948, ‘Those that fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it’. Trump is not the first strongman or populist leader. Max Weber wrote about the charismatic leader a long time ago. So I don’t think it should be as surprising as people find it to be. I think that Roy Cohn’s shadow and legacy is behind it, and it gave him the tools and the playbook he needed in order to gain power and ascendancy.”
The Apprentice, an Irish co-production from Tailored Films, premiered at Cannes to good reviews, but it struggled to find US distribution. It has ended up opening just a few weeks before the US presidential election. That feels like a deliberate gesture towards the Republican candidate.
“Coming out now, where this film is intersecting with history and politics, is a heavy thing,” Strong says. “It has a point of view, but it’s not simply trying to demonise Donald Trump. I think that storytelling has a place right now. I’ve been thinking a lot about this thing that William Saroyan wrote. He said: ‘Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand.’”
That seems a sensible view. Yet, in the current discourse, dramas about malign forces are, even before a frame has been screened, often bitterly frowned upon. Think of the online fury that erupted at news that Steve Coogan was to play Jimmy Savile. The resulting programme ended up being greatly praised. Even now there are liberal critics objecting to the mere idea of a Trump film.
“Anthony Hopkins played Hitler and Nixon, but he also played CS Lewis. He also played Picasso,” Strong says. “And Hannibal Lecter. It’s an art form. It’s storytelling. It’s only recently that we have begun to find it injurious to portray people that we don’t like.”
The two men have the happy look of comrades – almost a double act – coming to the end of a wearying world tour. There are always pressures, but being called scum by a former president is rarely mentioned on the contracts of employment. Strong seems genuinely impressed by his other half.
“You’re in the line of fire,” he says to Stan. “It was a real privilege and pleasure to get to do this together.”
The Apprentice is in cinemas now
Actor Jeremy Strong, best known for playing troubled media heir Kendall Roy in TV’s Succession, has told NME that he’s definitely on the cast for upcoming Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere.
Rumours first emerged in May that he was up for the part of Jon Landau, The Boss’s longtime manager, but were never officially confirmed by Strong’s team. Now he says he’s rubber-stamped the deal – and revealed his favourite Springsteen record to boot: 1982’s stark, introspective gem ‘Nebraska’.
“It just always spoke to me, there’s a melancholy to it,” he said. “I am doing [Deliver Me From Nowhere] but I’d always felt that way about that album. There’s a narrative to it that comes from a very deep place in him and you can feel that.”
Strong also singled out Van Morrison’s acclaimed 1968 release ‘Astral Weeks’ as one he always goes back to. “It’s transportive and it’s pretty perfect,” he said. You can watch the full video interview, in which Strong is joined by Sebastian Stan – his co-star from new film The Apprentice – above.
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