Vanity Fair

It’s the noise living in all of our heads—when we turn on the news, scroll through Elon Musk’s X, or listen to any number of podcasts. Donald Trump’s voice even forced its way into awards season with The Apprentice, which fictionalizes the president’s ascent in the New York City real estate scene in the 1970s and ’80s. Despite a long and difficult battle for distribution, the film earned a pair of Oscar nominations: one for Sebastian Stan’s lead performance as Trump, and the other for Jeremy Strong’s supporting turn as his shadowy mentor, Roy Cohn.

Stan’s performance is made not just by his sideswept blonde wig and perpetually pouted lips, but his total mastery of Trump’s idiosyncratic diction. For that, we can thank dialect coach Liz Himelstein, who has devoted her life to helping performers find characters through accent. That means phonetically breaking down dialogue—every vowel, diphthong, and consonant change—in addition to giving her high-profile clients primary source material they can study.

The key to Stan’s transformation turned out to be Trump’s 1980 conversation with gossip columnist Rona Barrett. “In that interview, we found so much of him,” Himelstein tells Vanity Fair, speaking in the soothing, perfectly enunciated tone one would expect from a person who teaches accents for a living. “It was a treasure trove of sounds and cadence, and also [Trump] being 34 years old, his younger voice.”
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