Category: Articles

Oct
13

News: Sebastian Stan Gets Candid About What It Was Like Portraying Donald Trump [Exclusive]

Collider

Known worldwide as Bucky Barnes in seven (soon eight!) Marvel pictures, Sebastian Stan wowed festival audiences by showcasing himself as one of this year’s most intriguing, noteworthy character actors. First in Aaron Schimberg’s stirring A Different Man, and now as one of the most recognized faces on the planet, Donald J. Trump in the provocative upcoming biopic, The Apprentice. The movie also stars Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump and Martin Donovan as Fred Trump.

From director Ali Abbasi (Border) comes The Apprentice. The fantastic movie is a grounded, gritty exploration of the corrosive and unpredictable relationship of infamous McCarthy-era prosecutor Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and Trump. During this interview, Stan sat with Collider’s Steve Weintraub to discuss the film’s acute punk rock feel, the moral grayness of Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, and the complexities of portraying such controversial figureheads. Steve also did his best to get some Marvel tea brewing for Stan’s dedicated Winter Soldier fanbase. Check out the full conversation in the transcript below.

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Oct
13

News: Sebastian Stan Says Studio CEO Told Him Playing Trump Would “Alienate Half the Country

THR -The ‘Apprentice’ actor and co-star Jeremy Strong explain why they think it’s a good thing the film is coming out ahead of the election.

It seems like a given that Sebastian Stan would have been warned against portraying controversial figure Donald Trump in The Apprentice, but one studio CEO went a step further in his caution.

During a conversation with The New York Times published ahead of the film’s release in theaters today, the actor shared what his family and friends said when he told them he was taking on the role and noted that he spoke to people before agreeing to it.

“Pretty sure my mom said, ‘At least you get to shave,’” Stan said. “But I asked a lot of people about it, actually. A CEO of a studio told me not to do it because I was going to alienate half the country, and a casting director, who I respect very much said, ‘We don’t need another Trump movie, you’re never going to get any applause for it.’” (Contrary to that casting director, Stan has already begun receiving Oscar buzz for playing the former president and current Republican presidential nominee.)

The A Different Man star also revealed that people asked him if he would be worried about his safety following the film’s release. “But for some reason every time somebody said, ‘Don’t do it,’ it made me want to do it more,” he admitted.

The Apprentice follows a young Donald Trump in 1970s New York as he tries to make a name for himself as the second son of a wealthy family. Then he meets cutthroat lawyer Roy Cohn, who sees him as “the perfect protégé,” who will do whatever it takes to win, according to the description.

Director Ali Abbasi explained that the film can be interpreted in different ways. It can be seen as the story of a man becoming “a monster,” or it could be more about “human tragedy,” if the people in the story hadn’t been so focused on winning and taking.

Jeremy Strong, who portrays Cohn in The Apprentice, told the Times he feels the film is “mandatory viewing for any sentient beings who care about what’s happening in this country” ahead of the presidential election next month.

“I think it offers vital insight, which could move the needle in a real way,” the Emmy-winning Succession star said. “In this moment where we’re surrounded by rhetoric of hate and divisiveness, I think art has a place and film has a place.”

Stan, for his part, noted that he worries that people are “desperate for answers and for guidance” and just want to be told how they should feel and what’s right and wrong.

“This whole discomfort with the film only reflects why it’s important: It isn’t just what you’re learning about Trump, it’s also what you’re learning about yourself from Trump,” he said. “I worry that we’re not going deeper anymore with how we approach things. We’re just reading Wikipedia pages. If that’s what you’re going to do, then you’ll just float among the rest of the ghosts of Christmas past. But the rest of us, at least, are going to try and get to the bottom of some things.”

Oct
13

News: I Can’t Stop Thinking About the Most Horrific Scene in The Apprentice

Movieweb

About halfway through The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi’s divisive biopic about the early career of Donald Trump takes a jarring turn that will inevitably alienate some viewers. Up until this point, the plot has largely focused on the relationship between Sebastian Stan’s Trump and his mentor, notorious prosecutor Roy Cohn, whom Jeremy Strong plays as if Cohn invented the sinister gay trope (honestly, he might have). Written by Gabriel Sherman, The Apprentice dramatizes actual events, including the scene in question, when Trump sexually assaults his then-wife, Ivana Trump (Maria Bakalova). It’s an intensely unsettling scene that feels crucial to the film’s narrative structure and impact – clearly, I can’t stop thinking about it weeks later – but is it necessary?

Perhaps naively, I wasn’t expecting a graphic sexual assault scene in the middle of The Apprentice, but given the subject, I shouldn’t have been surprised. It happens about halfway through the movie, when Ivana attempts to recapture the intimacy in her marriage to Donald, whose insecurities have fully curdled into repulsive misogyny. Ivana gives her husband a self-help book about intimacy, and he rejects her, explaining that he’s no longer attracted to her at all. They get into a heated argument that turns physical, and Donald violently sexually assaults his wife. That description may seem redundant, but given that scenes of sexual assault have become less frequent in movies and TV, and the ones we do see are relatively tame, it’s apt.

Like almost everything else in The Apprentice, this scene is based on an actual event. Sherman, the film’s screenwriter and a professional journalist, told Entertainment Weekly that he had the script vetted by his lawyers in the hopes of avoiding the wrath of the notoriously litigious former president. “I submitted an annotated draft of the script to our lawyers that was point-by-point articulating where the information came from, and how I dramatized the scenes,” Sherman said. “So it was rigorously supported by the research.” The scene is based on a sworn deposition Ivana Trump gave during her divorce from Donald Trump, in which she described her husband’s attack as a “violent assault.”

Author Harry Hurt III covered the deposition and the alleged assault in his 1993 book The Lost Tycoon. In the lead up to its publishing date, Trump’s team released a conspicuous statement from the former Mrs. Trump in which she walked back her previous allegations:

“I wish to say that on one occasion during 1989, Mr Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently toward me than he had during our marriage. As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness which he normally exhibited toward me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”

The Apprentice does interpret Ivana’s deposition in the literal sense, resulting in the most disturbing and controversial scene in the entire film (Roy Cohn’s collection of frogs notwithstanding).

As a young cinephile in my teens and twenties, I often defended similar scenes in movies and (to a lesser extent) television shows. Sexual assault is a vile, irrevocable act that leaves victims deeply traumatized and forever changed – and if it’s crucial to a character’s story, it seems disingenuous to gloss over it. If movies are meant to generate empathy, then shouldn’t sexual assault be shown as the heinous act that it is? Shouldn’t the filmmaker attempt to depict assault in such a way that elicits a proportionate reaction from the viewer? I’m less inclined to jump into the rape-scene discourse these days, and thankfully, there are fewer rape scenes to discourse about, but as someone who has experienced sexual assault, and who believes that movies – and art – are capable of generating empathy, I still get preoccupied by these questions.

In The Apprentice, the scene creates a line of demarcation; what was, for the previous hour, a black comedy about two horrible men, suddenly becomes a horror film. On a functional level, the scene is meant to rattle you, and it vigorously upends the unspoken covenant between the film and the viewer. We watch movies from a safe distance, taking comfort in the fact that what we’re seeing isn’t real, and it can’t hurt us. But there’s a meta quality to this scene and the latter half of The Apprentice, as we’re violently reminded that Donald Trump isn’t just a character or a political boogeyman – he’s real. And lest you forget, he’s not only been accused of sexual assault by more than 20 women, but in 2023, he was also found liable of sexually assaulting journalist E. Jean Carroll in 1996. Despite this (and his multiple indictments and criminal convictions), Trump is still on the ballot in November.

For these reasons alone, depicting the sexual assault of Ivana Trump feels imperative. It’s a pivotal scene that makes the second half of The Apprentice more impactful, transforming the film from a white-collar political fable into a visceral warning. And the scene is based on Ivana Trump’s sworn deposition; it wasn’t invented to up the narrative stakes. At the same time, the moment is so disturbing and so violent that, like many viewers, I can’t help but wonder if it could’ve been softened in the editing room – a question that seems almost ridiculous to ask about depicting a heinous act of gendered violence. Of course it should be horrible. It is horrible.

The Apprentice offers a vital reminder that behind the humorous verbal flubs and deranged all-caps tirades on social media, which we have so much fun ridiculing, there is a horrible man whose actions have human consequences. Again, I ask: Is that scene necessary? I don’t have a simple answer. But I do know that I haven’t stopped thinking about this movie since I saw it. If nothing else, it’s effective.

Oct
13

News: How ‘The Apprentice’ Filmed the Donald Trump Liposuction and Hair Transplant Scenes

Variety

In Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice,” there is a scene where Donald Trump (played by Sebastian Stan) gets a hair transplant to remove a bald spot as well as liposuction to look slimmer.

The film follows Trump as he starts out as a local real estate developer in the 1970s to become a national celebrity in the 1980s. He learns the power game from Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), a ruthless and hedonistic political fixer. Hair department head Michelle Cote, along with prosthetics leads Sean Sansom and Brandi Boulet, were the artisans responsible for transforming Stan into Trump and helping to pull off the sequence.

As time passes, Trump starts to lose his hair and gain weight to the point where he’s popping amphetamines to help with his weight loss. But it doesn’t work.

Stan gained 15 pounds for the role to reflect Trump’s body transformation; the costume department also made a padded suit with a prosthetic belly. “Any of the scenes where his shirt was off or his robe was open, we’d put the fake piece on him,” says Boulet. The team used the prosthetic abdomen for a look they nicknamed “Pills Donny.”

“We had a fake belly that we made for Sebastian for part of his ‘Pills Donny’ look, which was my favorite one to do, because he was all red, blotchy, always eating and sweaty and a little disheveled,” Boulet explains.

Due to his hair loss and weight gain, in the film, Trump resorts to plastic surgery. For the hair transplant scene, Sansom reveals that they used “the top of a fake head with a scalp. Michelle had a toupee, and an area was cut away where the scalp would be removed. The hair was punched in one hair at a time, and the piece was rigged with a bloodline, and the scalpel had a bloodline on it too — and it was shot in one day.”

When audiences are first introduced to Trump, he’s much younger, so Boulet used prosthetic lift pieces on Stan’s face. “We pulled his cheeks and eyes up and tightened his face to make him look younger,” Boulet explains, adding that “for skin tone, we had him a bit lighter than the classic orange that you see at the end.”

Cote even gave Stan a blonder wig with medium sideburns for that early phase of Trump. But it was an evolving look, with his eyebrows, hair and skin tone all changing as time passed. “When he’s younger, his hair was golden because he was outside more and had some natural highlights,” Cote explains. “As he got older, he lost his highlights and [his hair] became darker.”

To capture Trump aging, Boulet would lower Stan’s lift pieces. Cheek plumpers were then added to “bury” the actor’s chiseled face and defined cheekbones. “He had an upper dental plate that didn’t cover his teeth. They were lumps under his lips that pushed the [mouth] area out more so that it was flatter,” Samson explains. “And they were put into his lower lip to give him that Donald look from the nose down.”

One challenge that the team had to navigate was Stan’s facial hair. With day-long shoots, Stan’s facial hair would start to emerge, which meant constant touchups were necessary. “He’s got a five o’clock shadow the minute he starts shaving. So, we had to work with little things like that where we’d have to cover it and blend the prosthetic.”

Makeup artist Colin Penman recalls being captivated while watching the monitor when Stan and Maria Bakalova, who plays Ivana Trump, recreated the 1988 Oprah Winfrey interview. “I knew we had something because there’s this fine line where we don’t want to do a parody. We want it to be real,” he says.

In addition to his weight gain, Stan came fully prepared to play and capture the essence of the former president. “Production had put aside a large file of reference videos and photos that everyone was using,” says Sansom. “We were trying to recreate and reproduce some of the photos as best as we could.”

Boulet adds, “Sebastian had everything. His phone was full of research. He’d come in the morning and would be studying and watching videos.”

Oct
11

News: Sebastian Stan Says Studio CEO Told Him Playing Trump Would “Alienate Half the Country”

THR

It seems like a given that Sebastian Stan would have been warned against portraying controversial figure Donald Trump in The Apprentice, but one studio CEO went a step further in his caution.

During a conversation with The New York Times published ahead of the film’s release in theaters today, the actor shared what his family and friends said when he told them he was taking on the role and noted that he spoke to people before agreeing to it.

“Pretty sure my mom said, ‘At least you get to shave,’” Stan said. “But I asked a lot of people about it, actually. A CEO of a studio told me not to do it because I was going to alienate half the country, and a casting director, who I respect very much said, ‘We don’t need another Trump movie, you’re never going to get any applause for it.’” (Contrary to that casting director, Stan has already begun receiving Oscar buzz for playing the former president and current Republican presidential nominee.)

The A Different Man star also revealed that people asked him if he would be worried about his safety following the film’s release. “But for some reason every time somebody said, ‘Don’t do it,’ it made me want to do it more,” he admitted.

The Apprentice follows a young Donald Trump in 1970s New York as he tries to make a name for himself as the second son of a wealthy family. Then he meets cutthroat lawyer Roy Cohn, who sees him as “the perfect protégé,” who will do whatever it takes to win, according to the description.

Director Ali Abbasi explained that the film can be interpreted in different ways. It can be seen as the story of a man becoming “a monster,” or it could be more about “human tragedy,” if the people in the story hadn’t been so focused on winning and taking.

Jeremy Strong, who portrays Cohn in The Apprentice, told the Times he feels the film is “mandatory viewing for any sentient beings who care about what’s happening in this country” ahead of the presidential election next month.

“I think it offers vital insight, which could move the needle in a real way,” the Emmy-winning Succession star said. “In this moment where we’re surrounded by rhetoric of hate and divisiveness, I think art has a place and film has a place.”

Stan, for his part, noted that he worries that people are “desperate for answers and for guidance” and just want to be told how they should feel and what’s right and wrong.

“This whole discomfort with the film only reflects why it’s important: It isn’t just what you’re learning about Trump, it’s also what you’re learning about yourself from Trump,” he said. “I worry that we’re not going deeper anymore with how we approach things. We’re just reading Wikipedia pages. If that’s what you’re going to do, then you’ll just float among the rest of the ghosts of Christmas past. But the rest of us, at least, are going to try and get to the bottom of some things.”

Oct
10

News: ‘A Different Man’ Stars Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson On The Power of Genre

Dread Central – The “Apprentice” stars and the director Ali Abbasi say their film is a “humanistic” treatment of the former president and his mentor, Roy Cohn.

Adam Schimberg’s new film A Different Man is many things. It’s funny, tense, scary, sad, heart-warming, and a little gross, all while centering on two incredible performances from Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson. It’s a story that goes to uncomfortable places, especially in how it confronts how we perceive ourselves and the people around us and how insecurity can slowly destroy you.
In the film:

An aspiring actor (Sebastian Stan) undergoes a radical medical procedure to drastically transform his appearance. However, his new dream face quickly turns into a nightmare as he becomes obsessed with reclaiming what was lost.

While A Different Man isn’t a horror film, per se, Schimberg is still playing in that sandbox, especially when it comes to crafting his own personal brand of body horror. And that’s ignoring the pervasive sense of dread that builds in each frame. It’s almost like Cronenberg meets the weirdest episode of Seinfeld.

Schimberg, Stan, and Pearson spoke with Dread Central at Fantastic Fest about the power of prosthetics, why we love horror, and Poltergeist.
Dread Central: Congratulations on showing A Different Man to a horror crowd. I loved when you said last night before the screening that you wanted to show this to a horror crowd. Why have you been so excited for horror people to see this?

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Oct
10

News: Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong Talk Becoming Donald Trump and Roy Cohn in The Apprentice

Vogue

You may have heard something about The Apprentice—the Donald Trump biopic that premiered at Cannes to great fanfare, and not a little controversy. Was director Ali Abbasi’s 1970s set film, starring Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as his mentor, the New York attorney and ruthless power broker Roy Cohn, too sympathetic to the striving, scheming characters at its center? (Maybe not: After Cannes, Trump’s lawyers threatened to sue.) Certainly when you watch The Apprentice, which opens in theaters Friday, it’s impossible not to be astonished, and enthralled, by the performances of Stan and Strong, who turn real-life hyper-polarizing figures into fascinating antiheroes.

But make no mistake: The Apprentice is a warning. This is a movie, written by the journalist Gabriel Sherman, that will leave you chilled. Here is the story of Trump’s rise, the lessons he learned from Cohn, and a portrayal of power at all costs—what it drives a person to and how it corrupts.

Vogue invited Stan and Strong onto The Run-Through with Vogue to talk about their performances, how the film came together, and why Americans should see it before the November 5 election. Below, read an excerpt of the conversation Vogue.com editor Chloe Malle and I conducted with the two actors in the podcast studio.
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Oct
10

News: Will Donald Trump see The Apprentice? The cast and filmmakers weigh in

EW – “I hope he sees it. That would alone be worth making it,” Jeremy Strong tells EW.

The cast and filmmakers behind The Apprentice agree on a lot about its controversial subject matter — except for the one question on everyone’s minds now that it’s finally hitting theaters: Will Donald Trump see the movie?

There are valid arguments and evidence for both possible answers. On the one hand, the former president and current Republican nominee has already threatened to sue the filmmakers over his portrayal, with his spokesperson calling it “a concoction of lies that repeatedly defames” Trump. And it’s true, it’s far from a glowing portrait. Over the course of the movie (opening Oct. 11), the dealmaker (played by Sebastian Stan) is shown taking diet pills, getting plastic surgery, and, most disturbing of all, raping his former wife, Ivana, as she alleged happened in a 1990 divorce deposition. (She later denied her initial testimony, saying she felt “violated” but did not mean to be alleging rape “in a literal criminal sense.”)

But it’s not all bad, either. The filmmakers have stressed that they aim to humanize Trump with their movie, which follows him in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s as he grows from a middling real estate heir into a man synonymous with wealth and power. Plus, the 45th president’s love for movies is well-documented. As referenced in the movie, it was his infatuation with West Side Story that led him to collect switchblades as a teen. When he found his son’s stash, Fred Trump Sr. shipped off young Donald to a harsh military school known for corporal punishment. After graduating, he continued toying with the idea of following his dream to become an actor before settling on business school. As president, he screened movies at the White House on multiple occasions, including several showings of his favorite, Sunset Boulevard.

The Apprentice filmmakers on ‘shocking’ struggle to find a buyer: ‘It’s cowardice in the face of Donald Trump’

“I hope he sees the movie, but I actually don’t think he would,” says Jeremy Strong, who plays Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn. “I think there’s a lot in it that he would recognize. And I think there’s nothing really in this movie that he hasn’t acknowledged and even bragged about at some point or another. I hope he sees it. That would alone be worth making it.”

“I’m sure he’s going to watch it at some point,” counters the film’s director, Ali Abbasi. “I feel like we’ve been fair, and I almost feel like there are a lot of things to like.”

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Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the film after covering Trump for years as a reporter, isn’t sure if Trump will see the movie, but he is sure that he wants him to. “Of course, I want everyone to see the movie from Donald Trump on down,” he says. “He doesn’t strike me as the most self-reflective person, but I think it would be fascinating to see him experience this part of his life and either agree with it or disagree. Whatever response he had, I think it would be really interesting.”

Asked to imagine how Trump might feel about it, Sherman notes he’d be “completely guessing,” but offers, “I think, on a basic level, he likes attention. So even if he says he hates the movie, I think there’s a part of him that likes that we’re talking about him as we speak. So I’m waiting for him to say on the campaign trail, ‘They got a Marvel superhero to play me. That’s the only person who could play me is a Marvel actor.’”

Speaking of the Marvel actor, Stan also struggles to envision whether Trump will see it and, if he did, what he’d make of it. “I have no idea. It’s very hard for me to know how he reacts next to anything, so I have no idea, and I can’t speak for him.”

He adds, “It seems like he’s got a lot going on, so I’m not sure he’ll have time, but if he wants to see it, I’m sure he knows who to call.”

Oct
09

News: “It Shouldn’t Be Controversial”: Inside The Apprentice’s Hard-Won New York City Premiere

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.”

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Oct
07

News: How Sebastian Stan became Donald Trump in The Apprentice

GQ UK -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.

When Sebastian Stan was growing up in Romania in the 1980s, he began to learn English through passive immersion. His mother, a concert pianist, would regularly play English music and language lessons on the family record player while they were going about their day. “I’d be playing with toys and I’d hear, like, ‘frog’ and ‘dog’, or whatever,” Stan says. It meant that by the time the actor moved to Vienna at age eight, where he attended an American international school – and later, when he moved to New York at 12 – he had a decent jumping-off point. “I’m a big believer in putting yourself in a situation where, subconsciously, there’s work being done.”

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