Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan know the risks of “The Apprentice” – entertainment

NEW YORK (AP) — Even in an election year, most people seem to agree on one aspect of Ali Abbasi’s much-discussed Donald Trump film “The Apprentice”: Sebastian Stan is a remarkably good Trump and Jeremy Strong is frighteningly compelling as New York Energy broker Roy Cohn.

One reviewer recently wrote that Strong’s portrayal of Cohn was “uncanny in its accuracy.” The critic? Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone.

“The Apprentice” has been plagued by controversy since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May, after which the Trump campaign promised legal action. The makers had to fight for a theatrical release, which opens on Thursday, just weeks before the election. The Trump campaign called it “election interference by Hollywood elites.”

“We’re completely on 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 the origin story of the Republican nominee, starting with Cohn, the ruthless lawyer whose tactics of denial, denial, and denial made him a sought-after Mafia mastermind, chief adviser to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt, and a guru for Trump tried to make a name for himself in the New York real estate industry.

“His disregard for reality and his denial of reality are, to me, the hallmarks of what he taught his star student,” Strong says, noting that Cohn’s boat was named Defiance. “It is a legacy of mendacity, lies, denial and the aggressive pursuit of victory as the only moral standard.”

“The Apprentice,” directed by Iranian-Danish filmmaker Abbasi and written by Gabriel Sherman, puts the Cohn-Trump relationship front and center, giving Strong and Stan two of the best roles of their careers. Strong calls Cohn “probably the most fascinating person I have ever studied, interviewed and tried to immerse myself in.”

For two much-lauded characters, the performances are unusually humanistic. Cohn has a rich history of portrayals, including Al Pacino in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” But Strong’s Cohn is uniquely authentic and camp-free. Trump, of course, was largely played with “Saturday Night Live”-style parodies. But Stan’s Trump is a tireless nerd who desperately wants to be molded by Cohn. Abbasi says, “I still don’t know exactly how he did it.”