How do you even begin to play a character like Donald Trump? One of the most polarising figures of the 21st century has, at various points, been a general celebrity-adjacent public persona; a reality TV host; then, one of America’s most divisive politicians. For Sebastian Stan – whose on-screen political subterfuge has so far been of the fictional kind as the MCU’s Winter Soldier – that was one of the biggest challenges of The Apprentice. No, not the business-flavoured series that Trump hosted in the US, but the title of Ali Abbasi’s new film, dramatising Trump’s early years.
As Stan tells Empire, the process of parsing everything that swirls around Donald Trump – the anger, the adoration, the hate-him-or-love-him obsession – while synthesising what needed to come across in The Apprentice was one hell of a challenge. “Working on it with Ali was like riding a psychotic horse through a blazing stable,” the actor says. It was a role that not only required getting inside Trump, but also assessing everything outside of him too. “We’re talking about somebody that everyone has an opinion about, that everyone has an impression of, that everyone has strong feelings for. I had to distance myself from that, but also I was paying attention to how he has been portrayed,” Stan explains. “So I watched everything. I watched stuff that impersonators did. All the things. But I also just had to go towards the collaboration and the vision that I was sharing with Ali.”
The result is a film that explores the moulding of the Trump we know under the wing of New York attorney Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong), dialling into the man behind the maelstrom. “The film normalises him. To some degree,” notes Stan. “There’s a preference to speak about him in a very selective, sort of distanced way. Like he’s this separate entity from the rest of us humans here on Earth. He’s either God, in the skies, blessed by everything, or he’s like Satan incarnate into the depths of the Earth. And the truth is, he is a human being. The movie shows there is much more here to relate and understand than I think we’re willing to admit. And to me, there’s a journey of watching a man turn to stone over a process of time.”
Read Empire’s full The Apprentice story – speaking to Sebastian Stan and Ali Abbasi about their provocative Donald Trump origin story – in the 40 Years Of The Terminator issue, on sale Thursday 26 September. Order a copy online here. The Apprentice comes to UK cinemas from 18 October.