As the 2024 election season heats up, a new film has spotlighted the formative years of one of the most polarizing figures in modern American politics – Donald Trump. “The Apprentice,” directed by Ali Abbasi, offers a gritty and unflinching look at Trump’s ascent in the cutthroat world of 1970s and 80s New York real estate.
Starring Sebastian Stan as the young Trump and Jeremy Strong as his notorious political mentor Roy Cohn, the movie has captivated audiences at the Cannes Film Festival. It is now making its way to American screens. But its arrival has not been without controversy, as the former president himself has lashed out at what he calls a “fake and classless” portrayal of his life.
For actor Jeremy Strong, the weight of depicting such a pivotal figure in recent history is not lost. “The world is on fire, and the stakes are so high. They’ve maybe never been higher at this moment in our democracy,” he told Vanity Fair. Strong, known for his nuanced work in shows like “Succession,” is tasked with channeling the ruthless ambition and shameless tactics of Cohn, the McCarthy-era attorney who became a key advisor to the young Trump.
“Roy’s legacy is a legacy of shamelessness, mendacity, lies, dissimulation, brutality, and winning as the only moral measure,” Strong explained. But the actor also saw a more complex side to the notorious Cohn, describing him as having a “kind of guileless innocence and charm at the same time as he was a lethal, brutal, ruthless, savage, remorseless person.”
This duality is mirrored in Sebastian Stan’s portrayal of Trump himself. The “Avengers” star had to strip away the caricature of the current-day Trump to focus on the man beneath the bluster. “I see someone that is just relentlessly going to go the distance at no matter what cost, and it’s the loneliest person in the world to me,” Stan said at the New York premiere.
The film’s director, Ali Abbasi, faced the challenge of crafting a sprawling narrative with a large cast of characters while maintaining a cohesive through-line. His solution was to zero in on the transformative relationship between Trump and Cohn. “We want to focus on this particular relationship, the transformational relationship between him and Roy, and see him transform through that and become the person we know today,” Abbasi explained.
This decision has allowed “The Apprentice” to delve deep into the origins of Trump’s rise, peeling back the layers of his public persona to reveal the complex and often troubling figure at the core. The film’s controversial depiction of Trump’s relationship with his first wife, Ivana, including a scene portraying an alleged sexual assault, has drawn the ire of the former president himself.
“My former wife, Ivana, was a kind and wonderful person, and I had a great relationship with her until the day she died. The writer of this pile of garbage, Gabe Sherman, a lowlife and talentless hack, who has long been widely discredited, knew that but chose to ignore it,” Trump wrote in a scathing social media post.
However, the film’s writer, Gabe Sherman, stands by the accuracy of the scenes, noting that Ivana’s account of the alleged incident was “far more graphic and brutal” than what was depicted on screen.
As “The Apprentice” continues to generate headlines, its release during a pivotal election cycle has not gone unnoticed. Actor Jeremy Strong acknowledged the “chilling” timing, saying, “None of them have quite the resonance and real-world ramifications that this does.”
Whether audiences will embrace or reject the film’s unflinching portrayal of Trump’s origins remains to be seen. But one thing is sure: “The Apprentice” has succeeded in sparking a necessary and challenging conversation about the foundations of power, influence, and the enduring legacy of one of America’s most divisive figures.