Irish Times

“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