NEW YORK (WS News) — Even in an election year, most seem to agree on one aspect about Ali Abbasi’s much-debated Donald Trump film “The Apprentice”: Sebastian Stan is a remarkably good Trump and Jeremy Strong is chillingly riveting as the New York power broker Roy Cohn.
One reviewer recently wrote that Strong’s portrayal of Cohn is “uncanny in its accuracy.” The critic? Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone.
Since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May, after which the Trump campaign pledged legal action, “The Apprentice” has been hounded by controversy. Its makers have had to fight to secure a theatrical release, which, in opening Thursday, comes just weeks ahead of the election. The Trump campaign has called it “election interference by Hollywood elites.”
“We’re way out on a limb,” Strong says.
The movie, 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 of the Republican nominee beginning with Cohn, the ruthless attorney whose tactics of deny-deny-deny made him a sought-after fixer for the mafia, chief counsel for Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt and a guru to Trump when he was trying to make a name for himself in New York real estate.
“His defiance of reality, and his denial of reality, to me are the signature components of what he instilled in his star pupil,” Strong says, noting that Cohn’s boat was named Defiance. “It’s a legacy of mendacity and lies and denialism and the aggressive pursuit of winning as the only moral measure.”
“The Apprentice,” directed by the Iranian-Danish filmmaker Abbasi and scripted by Gabriel Sherman, puts the Cohn-Trump relationship at its center, and in doing so, gives Strong and Stan two of the best roles of their careers. Strong calls Cohn “probably the single most fascinating person I’ve ever studied and interrogated and attempted to inhabit.”
For two much-satirized figures, the performances are uncommonly humanistic. Cohn has a rich tradition 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, has been mostly played with “Saturday Night Live”-style parody. But Stan’s Trump is a blank-slate striver, eager to be molded by Cohn. Abbasi says, “I still don’t know exactly how he did it.”
