Sebastian Stan stars as Donald Trump, Maria Bakalova plays Ivana Trump, and Jeremy Strong portrays Roy Cohn in the film that opens in theaters on Friday, Oct. 11, 2024
Director Ali Abbasi was caught off guard when he first read the screenplay for “The Apprentice,” his new movie about the relationship between New York City developer Donald Trump and cutthroat attorney Roy Cohn.
“I think I had the same initial reaction as a lot of people who watch the movie now, which is, I was surprised,” says Abassi, an Iranian-Danish filmmaker making his English-language debut with “The Apprentice.” “I was expecting it to be harsher or like a hit job, to be honest, and to rip him apart and tell me how despicable he is and how everything is bad about him and his family.
“And it wasn’t that,” he says of the film, which was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. “It was like a real genuine desire to understand him as a human being – and understand not only him but people around him.”
“The Apprentice” stars Sebastian Stan, best known for playing Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, in Marvel movies, as ’70s and ’80s-era Trump. Jeremy Strong, who played Kendall Roy in HBO’s “Succession,” plays Roy Cohn, the onetime communist-hunting counsel of Sen. Joseph McCarthy turned cutthroat attorney who takes Trump under his wing. Maria Bakalova, who played Borat’s teen daughter in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” plays Ivana Trump.
“The Apprentice” created controversy with its Cannes debut, primarily for a scene that depicted Trump sexually assaulting Ivana Trump, an attack she alleged in a sworn deposition during her divorce from Trump but later walked back. (Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Donald Trump, said in a statement that the film is “pure malicious defamation” that “should never see the light of day.”)
Outside of that scene, and a few that portray Trump’s vanity over weight gain and hair loss, “The Apprentice” isn’t all that controversial, telling the story of Trump as a young man with big dreams and Cohn as the fixer who helped him until Trump cast off Cohn when he was dying of AIDS.
The story takes place entirely before Trump publicly expressed any political aspirations, and that allowed Abbasi to tell a story that is more intimate and personal than many might expect.
“I think it’s almost like a Frankenstein story,” Abbasi says. “You sort of see how Roy creates him in his own image, or recreates him in his own image, and how he goes from someone who maybe does not necessarily have a lot of political ambitions, who is not necessarily well aware of politics and this intricacy of the power and media around him, to being hyper-aware of that.
“I think that transformation is really the subject of the movie,” he says. “That’s why I think it makes sense to sort of focus the movie on that transformation.
The first half being sort of the ’70s, is more organic,” Abbasi says. “It looks like film looks. We’re in New York and things are going really bad. It has, like, a little bit of a vibe of these movies – maybe reminds you of ‘Taxi Driver,’ maybe reminds you of ‘Dog Day Afternoon.’ There’s some grit and authenticity about that.
“Then you go to the ’80s, and you went from, you know, newsreels of ’70s being shot on 16 millimeter [film] to ’80s where video became cheap enough to use instead, and that gave this whole thing a sort of artificial spin.”The story behind the man
For Stan, the first reaction to receiving Gabriel Sherman’s screenplay for “The Apprentice” was simple: Why me?
“It was just a curiosity to begin with of why I would be getting this call and not somebody else,” he says. “But then Ali Abbasi is an incredible, fearless filmmaker. I really admired his films, particularly the last one, ‘Holy Spider.
