Oscar-Bait Dispatch: Revisiting The Apprentice
Claims that Donald Trump’s election is ruining lives have abounded since November 5th. But, other than the career DC bureaucrats threatened by DOGE, actor Sebastian Stan may be the one person with a legitimate gripe. Stan has earned well-deserved raves for his role in October’s controversial movie The Apprentice playing a young Trump as the protege of notorious lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong).
Yet, as awards season kicks off in the shadow of 47’s decisive win, Stan has found himself with an unexpected handicap. Sure, he earned a Golden Globe nomination earlier this week along with Strong, but he’s been excluded from routine seasonal press events like Variety’s “Actors on Actors” because no one wants to talk about Trump.
In one of the first awards season press events after the election, Stan, Strong, actress Maria Bakalova, screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, and director Ali Abbasi, shared their views on a film that, as we said in October, is both one of the year’s best and the most impressive presidential biopic since John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln.
“I found myself, probably, like a lot of people now, writing off Donald Trump simply by being annihilated daily for years at this point—whether it's an SNL impression, 400 emails, CNN, or Fox News,” Stan said. “And here was an opportunity to actually go in and try to understand and educate oneself. Hopefully, if we did our job right, we reflect and pass on what we can learn about this person; how he came to be what he is, not just the ugly parts, but also—as uncomfortable as it might be—to try to understand what makes him so appealing that he can get the popular vote in 2024.”
Strong shared Stan’s views about the difficulty he had coming to terms with someone as demonized as Cohn, who, over the past quarter century has been the subject of several documentaries and a main character in Tony Kushner’s Broadway play Angels in America as well as its 2003 HBO adaptation. Given the Succession star’s reputation for extreme method acting—a characterization which he has long taken issue with—the role offered him a rare opportunity to challenge his own assumptions. “It just felt like the highest degree of difficulty and challenge to try and get inside the skin of this person who some people considered one of the worst human beings of the 20th century,” Strong said. “Some people considered him this absolutely irredeemable, reprehensible abomination of humanity, who was also in his time, beloved by many, and who was undeniably a brilliant lawyer. We make movies about heroes and villains and we polarize everything. I'm very interested in not doing that.”
For Bakalova, playing Ivana Trump allowed her to mine her own personal experiences as an Eastern European immigrant to the U.S. “I do find a lot of things that I recognize in myself, like growing up in Czechoslovakia and growing up in Bulgaria. Being in that communistic environment is not a big difference,” Bakalova said. “Having the desire, having a dream. In my case, that was through music in the beginning and finding a way to escape the regime. Even though we're no longer a communist country, it still felt this way when I was younger. So I do find a lot of similarities between her approach to life and my approach to life, and the fact that if you want to achieve, you have to work, and you have to work hard.”
Though journalist-turned-screenwriter Sherman has remained firmly entrenched in politics for most of his career writing for outlets like Vanity Fair and New York magazine as well as a bestselling book about former Fox News boss Roger Ailes, he tried to suppress political judgement so his characters could flourish. “I thought that there was enough for a Shakespearean arc of this mentor-protege relationship,” Sherman said. “And that was the genesis of how I thought this one relationship would explain so much of how we got to where we are today.”
As a result, Sherman sees the film as one that could lead his legacy media brethren into a much needed correction. “We need to start to wonder if people feel so constricted by our culture that they can't say or do things without the fear of offense, they find relief in somebody like Donald Trump. His lack of inhibition is something that his election really brought into my head.”
Few American directors could have taken on a script like The Apprentice and made it through unscathed—just look at Adam McKay’s Dick Cheney hit piece and box-office dud Vice. Such is why the Danish-Iranian auteur behind such singular arthouse hits as Holy Spider and Border offered a perspective that has made The Apprentice a movie both the Cannes Film Festival and Roger Stone could laud. “I like to explore universes with moral complexities, with flawed characters,” Abbasi said. “There’s shades of gray in all of us, but I get excited about a lot of shades of gray, even more than fifty.”
The Apprentice is available for digital rental.