Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan on ‘The Apprentice’: ‘We’re right on the edge’

Even in an election year, most seem to agree on one aspect of Ali Abbasi’s much-discussed Donald Trump film “The Apprentice”: Sebastian Stan makes a remarkably good Trump and Jeremy Strong is chillingly compelling as New York power broker Roy Cohn.

A reviewer recently wrote that Strong’s portrayal of Cohn is “uncanny in its accuracy.” The critic? Roger Stone, former Trump advisor.

Since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May, after which the Trump campaign promised legal action, ‘The Apprentice’ has been dogged by controversy. The creators have had to fight to secure a theatrical release, which when it opens Thursday comes just weeks before the election. The Trump campaign has called it “election interference by Hollywood elites.”

“We’re right on the edge,” Strong says.

The film, about Cohn’s mentorship of a young Trump in the Greed Is Good 1980s, is a dramatic election-year provocation. It’s an origin story for the Republican nominee, starting with Cohn, the ruthless lawyer whose deny-deny-deny tactics made him a sought-after fixer for the mob, lead lawyer for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt and a guru for Trump when he was trying to make a name for himself in New York real estate.

“His resistance to reality and his denial of reality are, to me, the defining components of what he instilled in his star student,” Strong says, noting that Cohn’s boat was named Defiance. “It is a legacy of mendacity and lies and denial and the aggressive pursuit of winning as the only moral standard.”

“The Apprentice,” directed by Iranian-Danish filmmaker Abbasi and written by Gabriel Sherman, focuses on the Cohn-Trump relationship, giving Strong and Stan two of the best roles of their careers. Strong calls Cohn “probably the most fascinating person I have ever studied, interrogated, and tried to inhabit.”

For two much-vilified figures, the performances are unusually humanistic. Cohn has a rich tradition of performances, including Al Pacino in Tony Kushner’s ‘Angels in America’. But Strong’s Cohn is uniquely authentic and camp-free. Trump, of course, has mostly been played with “Saturday Night Live”-style parody. But Stan’s Trump is an undisputed fighter, eager to be shaped by Cohn. Abbasi says, “I still don’t know exactly how he did it.”

“For him, there’s a special kind of risk-taking,” Abbasi says of Stan. “He has a different career path in the superhero world. But Sebastian, on the other hand, has always been someone who takes big risks. He’s humanized a lot of idiotic, sleazebag characters – people you don’t want to be. But somehow, when you see Sebastian play them, you think, ‘Maybe he’s not so bad after all.’

‘A crazy mountain to climb’ to portray Trump in ‘The Apprentice’

Most of the actors wanted nothing to do with playing Trump. But Stan signed up and stayed with the production for several years.

“I came along,” Stan says. “And it was also a ride, because it was not a film that was very easy to put together. It’s a movie I’ve known about for a while. I met Ali for the first time in 2019.”

“Of course it felt risky,” he adds. “But honestly, that played a role in the decision to some extent. It plays more into this recent approach to things I’ve been doing. It started for me about five years ago. I really started to see fear as a motivating factor, perhaps the right sign that I need to commit to something. It’s very easy to just keep doing things you think you’ve gotten good at. Then something comes along and it feels like such a crazy mountain to climb.”

That could go doubly true for “The Apprentice,” a film that raised financing and struggled to find distribution before Briarcliff Entertainment stepped forward this fall. Sherman first started writing it in 2017. He had been covering the 2016 Trump campaign for New York magazine and noticed a Trump aide commenting on Trump’s adoption of Cohn’s strategies.

“The idea came to me in a flash,” Sherman says. ‘That’s the movie. Donald was Roy’s student. Let’s create an origin story, a story of mentor and protégé about how this relationship set Donald on the path to becoming president.”

Trump, who first met Cohn in 1973 and remained close friends until Cohn’s death in 1986, has spoken of his admiration for him. “Roy was cruel, but he was a very loyal man,” Trump told author Tim O’Brien. “He acted cruelly to you.” Politico’s Michael Kruse described the relationship in 2016, writing, “Cohn’s philosophy shaped the worldview of the real estate mogul and the combative public persona evident in Trump’s presidential campaign.”

More historical analyzes of Cohn are on the way. Kai Bird, who wrote “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” on which Christopher Nolan’s film was based, is working on a biography of Cohn.

“Roy Cohn is suddenly one of the most influential people in our country, posthumously, because of what he brought to Donald Trump,” Strong said.

Finding “A Reptilian Pulse” to Play Roy Cohn

Strong was first drawn to playing Cohn several years ago for a project that ultimately fell through. But it got Strong thinking about Cohn’s intriguing paradoxes. If finding a character means finding the heartbeat, Strong says, “in this case it’s a kind of reptilian pulse.”

“In terms of a sociological, anthropological study, I find him to be a completely fascinating character,” says Strong. “My own judgments must be left at the door. But it was like peering into the heart of darkness.”

For the two actors, “The Apprentice” posed a particular challenge in balancing judgment and empathy. The film has provoked a spectrum of reactions. Abbasi has claimed that Trump may not like the film and invited him to see it. (“It’s an open invitation,” says Sherman.) Others have criticized the film for creating any degree of sympathy for the main characters.

“The only way we can learn is through empathy,” says Stan. “We must protect and continue to nourish empathy. And I think one way to nurture empathy is to show what the exact opposite can be.

“(Cohn) didn’t believe in showing vulnerability,” Strong said. “He was only interested in radiating strength, and I find that very tragic.”

After four seasons of HBO’s “Succession,” which depicted a fictionalized Rupert Murdoch in Logan Roy, Strong once again found himself exploring the ruthless machinations of power in New York City.

“I can certainly draw a line between the two. Rupert Murdoch is in the movie at a party at Roy’s house on 68th Street, and Roy and Rupert did a lot of business together,” Strong says. “In some ways I am a Zelig when it comes to these topics and themes.”

Strong was famously pilloried for a 2021 New Yorker profile that detailed his serious approach to staying in character. But Abbasi was still thrown by Strong’s Method ways at times. “There were days,” says the director, “when I thought, ‘Why isn’t he looking at me? Does he hate me?’ Oh, he has character.”

Strong describes the transformation in Cohn as “self-erasure,” a process that requires him to enter “a state of monofocus” to “change the stamp of your nature.” But he also hesitates to overemphasize his immersion.

“It’s all a game. It’s a game, so I don’t get lost in it,” Strong says. “I’m within the boundaries of the game, but I’m just committed to that game.”

Stan joked about his own Method acting in a scene where constant cheeseball eating led to a rough morning on the toilet. According to him, adopting Trump’s diet has had a negative impact on his health. “I finished the movie and had my blood work done and they said, ‘Your LDL levels are much higher, like 50% higher,’” Stan says with a chuckle.

At the same time, Stan also drew on his own experience. Like Abbasi, Stan, who grew up in Romania before coming to America, has a partially European perspective on Trump. He remembers coming to New York with his mother at the age of twelve.

“She said to me, ‘This is where it happens. This is where you become someone,” Stan says. “I really took that to heart. And I’ve had a very love-hate relationship with this thing that she passed on to me.

Embracing controversy for ‘The Apprentice’

Ultimately, the creators of ‘The Apprentice’ argue that all the tools of drama play a crucial role in bringing a deeper understanding to even the most polarizing political figures.

“My rule of thumb is that if everyone is happy, something is wrong,” says Abbasi. “I’m not afraid of controversy. It’s not where I get my kicks. But I also knew that this would happen to some of these things. The kind of movies I like, they have a temperament, just like people. You have people who are nice, polite and neutral, but they are not the kind of people you normally remember. People can be bad-tempered or foul-mouthed and you remember them. I want to be one of those people you remember, film-wise.”

Strong and Stan find themselves in the unlikely position of being scorned by the potential future president for a film that had to resort to raising money through Kickstarter. (The campaign has raised more than $400,000.) As far off as they may be, they both appear to be in the running for their first Academy Award nominations.

“Do I think it will change people’s minds? I’m not sure,” Strong said. “Do I think it will help anyone who sees this film to understand the origins of where we are today? Yes, I do. And do I think it can move the needle indefinitely in a direction that I hope we’re going in? I do.”