‘The Apprentice’ star Sebastian Stan reveals he relied on ‘instinct’ to play a young Donald Trump

CNN
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Sebastian Stan has played a wide range of characters so far in his career, but perhaps the most eye-catching of all comes this weekend, when his portrayal of a young and highly mobile Donald Trump is shown on the new movie “The Apprentice”.

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

“I think instinct is everything and collaboration,” Stan said in a recent interview with CNN. “You have to go into it and look at what serves the story, 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 for next month’s election was something he had to distance himself from.

“You have to detach yourself from the fear and all the noise that surrounds us at the moment,” she shared about how she focused on her performance.

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

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

“You obsess over it until it takes hold of you and it takes over you, and then it kind of comes out of you,” Strong told CNN, noting that he watched a lot of video footage of Cohn. “The way he looked at people and his demeanor and the reptilian eyes and what was inside him, his soul and the confusion and the denial of himself and the hatred and the vitriol.”

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

Understandably, the movie “The Apprentice” has been controversial. 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 sensationalizing lies that have long been debunked,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement to CNN at the time.

In an interview with CNN, the film’s director, Ali Abbasi, questioned whether American audiences would ever be able to see it. Surprisingly, external pressures regarding the film’s distribution weren’t the biggest challenges he faced while making “The Apprentice.”

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

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

“We want to focus on that very specific relationship, the transformative relationship between him and Roy and see him transform through that and become the person we know today,” he said. “So it became the red thread of the story, and we organized everything around it, and that was very helpful.”

“The Apprentice” is now in theaters.