“The Apprentice” star Sebastian Stan reveals he relied on his “instinct” to portray the young Donald Trump

CNN
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Sebastian Stan has played a variety of characters in his career so far, but perhaps the most striking of all comes this weekend when his portrayal of the young and up-and-coming Donald Trump stars in the new film “The Apprentice.”

The film, which stars award-winning “Succession” actor Jeremy Strong as Trump’s former lawyer and right-hand man Roy Cohn and Oscar-nominated “Borat 2” star Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump, required Stan to cover Trump’s early years to observe the form he represents.

“I think instinct is everything and collaboration,” Stan said in a recent interview with CNN. “You have to go into it and see what serves the story, what serves the character, without judgment, (without) all the good, the bad and the ugly.”

For Stan, the “noise” surrounding the former president and current Republican candidate in next month’s election was something he needed to distance himself from.

“You have to let go of the fear and all the noise that surrounds us during this time,” he said of how he focused on his performance.

Cohn has been portrayed in other works. These include last year’s Emmy-nominated film “Fellow Travelers,” in which he was portrayed by Will Brill, and the award-winning 2003 HBO miniseries “Angels in America,” in which Cohn was played by Al Pacino.

Strong said his take on Cohn came through “osmosis” after studying the late lawyer “endlessly.”

“You become obsessed with it until it overtakes you and takes possession of you, and then it just kind of comes out of you,” Strong told CNN, mentioning that he watched a lot of video footage of Cohn. “The way he looked at people, his demeanor and those reptilian eyes and what was inside him, his soul and the turmoil and the self-denial and the hate and the evil.”

“But it’s not like, ‘Now I’m going to put on this look and now I’m going to put on that one.’ It’s just all holistic,” he added. “Your job is to learn and understand these people holistically, completely, dimensionally, and then you just go on set and it comes out of you without thinking about it.”

Understandably, the film “The Apprentice” was met with controversy. CNN reported in May, around the time of the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, that Trump’s team was considering a lawsuit over the film’s release and distribution.

“This garbage is pure fiction, ripping apart long-debunked lies,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said in a statement to CNN at the time.

In an interview with CNN, the film’s director, Ali Abbasi, questioned whether US audiences would ever see the film. Surprisingly, the external constraints surrounding the film’s distribution were not the biggest challenges he faced in producing The Apprentice.

“I have to say that this story was the hardest thing for me to organize,” he continued, adding that it was a sprawling narrative with “so many characters that all feel very important.”

Abbasi said his answer was to highlight the central relationship between the characters played by Stan and Strong.

“We want to focus on this very special relationship, the transformative relationship between him and Roy, and see how he changes through it and becomes the person we know today,” he said. “That became the thread through the story and we organized everything around that and that was very helpful.”

“The Apprentice” is in theaters now.