I’ve added 20 photos to the gallery UHQ/Untagged of Sebastian at “ZFF Masters Sebastian Stan” – 20th Zurich Film Festival that took place this morning.
![](https://sebastian-stan.com/imgs/albums/EVENTS/2024/101224-ZFFConvo/thumb_014.jpg")
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.”
Aaron Schimberg’s new film, A Different Man, wears a few disguises: comedy, drama, paranoid thriller. It’s also a delirious tug of war between two men. There’s Edward, an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis who undergoes facial reconstruction surgery, played by Sebastian Stan. And then there’s Oswald, a charming man about town played by Adam Pearson, an actor with neurofibromatosis. Edward’s post-surgery life is upturned as his girlfriend and colleagues and career fall under Oswald’s spell. As Pearson says of his character in the latest episode of Esquire’s Freeze Frame: “I have the rizz, as the kids would say.”
In the episode, Pearson and Stan – who clearly get along a lot better in real like than they do on screen – go deep on their characters’ love-hate-can’t-get-enough-of-you dynamic as well as Oswald’s impressive karaoke offering (Pearson listened to “I Wanna Get Next to You” by Rose Royce for five hours as preparation). They also discuss the difficulty of defining the genre of this movie and the characters’ motivations. Is Edward mad? Is Oswald sincere? Ultimately, as Pearson points out, the film works because “it holds up mirrors rather than placards”. Watch on to figure things out yourself.
Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan on Becoming Roy Cohn and Donald Trump
October 10, 2024
Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan stopped by the Vogue office to tell us all about the making of one of 2024’s most controversial films, The Apprentice, which portrays the mentor/protoge relationship between the powerhouse lawyer Ray Cohn, played by Strong, and Donald Trump, played by Sebastian Stan. Strong and Stan share why they felt it was important to make the film, the lengths they went to to embody the characters, and what they are hoping audiences take from the film as we head into the presidential election.
I’ve added UHQ Photoshoots from AP Images, Vogue and New York Times. The AP Images session is the complete photoshoot featuring Sebastian
I’ve added more ‘Apprentice‘ press interviews below and one video which analyzes a scene from ‘A Different Man’ and screen captures have been added to the gallery. Enjoy.
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?
New York Times – The “Apprentice” stars and the director Ali Abbasi say their film is a “humanistic” treatment of the former president and his mentor, Roy Cohn.
It’s natural to feel nervous before presenting your movie at a major film festival. But in late August, when the director Ali Abbasi boarded a flight to the Telluride Film Festival, he wasn’t even sure if his new movie “The Apprentice” — a fictionalized look at the Machiavellian bond between the young Donald J. Trump (Sebastian Stan) and the lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) — would be permitted to play there at all.
“It was really crazy what happened, and I spared Jeremy and Sebastian some of it, but it is a demoralizing feeling,” Abbasi admitted during a recent video call with his two stars. The former president had been threatening legal action against “The Apprentice” since its May debut at the Cannes Film Festival, which chilled distributor interest in the movie for months and made it a controversial prospect for any subsequent festival willing to show it.
“If a movie comes out and people think it’s bad or it’s flawed, you can deal with that,” Abbasi said. “But when it goes into a safe box indefinitely, that was heavy.”
In the end, Trump failed to follow through on his threats, Telluride played the movie without incident and “The Apprentice” ultimately found a distributor in Briarcliff Entertainment, which will release the film on Friday. Still, Strong was perturbed by how many major studios were unwilling to take on the film and potentially incur the presidential candidate’s wrath.
“You think that things could be banned in North Korea or Russia or certain places, but you don’t think that will ever happen here,” Strong said. “It’s a real dark harbinger that it even nearly happened.”
Written by Gabriel Sherman, “The Apprentice” begins with Trump in his 20s as he toils under his real-estate magnate father and aspires to become a momentous figure in his own right. Still, Trump’s ambition exceeds his ability until he meets the savvy Cohn, who takes the young man under his wing and imparts ruthless rules for success that will eventually launch Trump onto the highest stage imaginable.
Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump biopic is set to hit theaters less than a month before Election Day on Friday, October 11. Sebastian Stan stars as Trump the businessman well before his days as U.S. president, and opposite Jeremy Strong as right-wing lawyer Roy Cohn. At the film‘s New York City premiere on Tuesday, October 8, the stars talked about the perfect timing of the project.
“It’s very fortuitous, I guess,” Stan told IndieWire. “And also, apparently it’s coming out on Fred Trump’s actual birthday, which I just learned about an hour ago. Well, maybe that’s meant to mean something.”
“I mean, we’re here on a red carpet and all the hoopla, but like, kidding aside, it feels like the highest stakes moment in the history of this country we happen to be in,” Strong told us. “We happen to have been part of a film that tells the story of Donald Trump’s apprenticeship with Roy Cohn, which in real life has sort of led to incalculable harm and destruction.”
“We don’t know what the future portends, and I think this movie has something to say about it,” Strong continued. “I think it’s essential for people in this country to see it and then make their own decisions about what kind of men these are.”
IndieWire critic David Ehrlich wrote in the review out of Cannes that “The Apprentice” begins with Trump depicted as an “insecure Manhattan nepo baby who fumbles around the city in search of his slumlord father’s non-existent affection.” Ehrlich compared the film to having “‘Godfather’-like dimensions with a fittingly vain and sociopathic riff on one of that masterpiece’s signature moments, as Abbasi intercuts Cohn’s funeral with footage of Trump going under the knife for a liposuction.”
The film also features Maria Bakalova as Ivanka Trump. She said she hesitated to join the movie but not because of the Trump story.
“I mean, it was a hesitation because she was a real person,” she said. “That was a hesitation. The last name, for me, didn’t really matter that much. The fact that she’s real and I have to portray her with respect and dignity and do my homework to get to know as much as possible about her journey, that was the hesitation. But knowing that I was going to be working with Ali, I was like, ‘I know that that’s going to be incredible.’”
Bakalova, who starred in Halina Reijn’s “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” also said she’s excited to see the director’s upcoming follow-up “Babygirl.”
“I haven’t seen it. I’m dying to see it. I know it’s incredible. I’ve already had people, friends of mine, that have seen it and even Rachel Sennott, everybody’s talking. It’s brilliant. I was having a conversation with somebody recently, and they couldn’t comprehend the idea that Halina managed to do both ‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’ and ‘Babygirl.’ [The latter] is such a Gen Z, very contemporary film, and this one apparently is something on a completely different level. So I cannot wait to see.”
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“The Apprentice” premieres October 11 in theaters.
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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