Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi has tackled Neanderthalic customs officers in Border, serial killers in Holy Spider, and the fearsome Clickers in post-apocalyptic horror series The Last Of Us. But with upcoming biopic The Apprentice, Abbasi is set to tackle a different beast altogether: the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump. An origin story for the former POTUS set across the 70s and 80, Abbasi's hotly anticipated movie is set to see Sebastian Stan take on the role of a young Trump as he rises to New York real estate fame. And after getting our first image of the Captain America: Winter Soldier star as DJT back in April, a new clip from the film — also featuring Jeremy Strong as Trump's mentor Roy Cohn — has been released. Check it out below:
It may be only a minute long, but is it too early to start popping Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong's names in our Oscar prediction lists? A far cry from Alec Baldwin, Jimmy Fallon, Trevor Noah, or Stephen Colbert's caricaturesque American TV impressions of Trump, Stan — a fully wigged wonder to behold in this incredibly 70s era accurate clip — seems to have gone more granular with his take on the Republican presidential candidate. Dialling into Trump's egotism as Strong's Cohn enthusiastically eggs him on to go bigger and bolder, Stan cuts a canny stand-in for the real thing as he fields a phone call about young Donald's real estate plans, playing up his self-described "flair" and — as has since become customary for Trump — leaning into hyperbole, big-time. It's the briefest of snapshots of what Abbasi's film is all about, and yet it captures Cohn and Trump's "Master and Apprentice" dynamic (no Apprentice pun intended) perfectly.
Here’s the brief official synopsis for the movie, which is also set to star Martin Donovan as Fred Trump and Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump: “The Apprentice is a dive into the underbelly of the American empire. It charts a young Donald Trump’s ascent to power through a Faustian deal with the influential right-wing lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn.”
With the American election just a couple of months away and Trump locked into a fiercely contested political battle with Kamala Harris, to call Abbasi's movie timely would be something of an understatement. The Apprentice is set to release in UK cinemas on 18 October, after which we'll all have just about enough time to brace ourselves for the prospect of... actually, let's just not say it, eh? We're sure everything will work out absolutely fine.