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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