As the 2024 movie schedule continues, one particularly controversial film is set to hit theaters is The Apprentice. Just weeks before Americans decide between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential election, Sebastian Stan is portraying a young Trump. However, Stan and his co-star Jeremy Strong insist the movie itself is not political.
The Apprentice has been in the works since 2018, while Donald Trump was president, however, it wasn’t until last fall that the movie was filmed. Jeremy Strong (who is best known for his role in the Succession cast) plays American lawyer Roy Cohn alongside Stan’s Trump in the movie, and he shared these thoughts about it with Entertainment Weekly:
This is a movie about two human beings, not about two villains or monsters. I don’t think the movie attempts to vilify these people. I think it attempts to understand where they came from and how they became who they are.
The Apprentice takes place during Donald Trump’s early years in business. It reportedly focuses on the relationship he had with Cohn, who was a New York City prosecutor known for working with Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Second Red Scare.
Sebastian Stan, who gained 20 pounds to transform into Trump, also added his thoughts about the film in the interview:
In some ways, it’s sort of a love story. One of my favorite things was what [Jeremy] said at the very beginning, which was, ‘I’m playing a guy named Roy, and you’re playing a guy named Donald.’
The Apprentice has been wrought with controversy lately. For one, Trump has said he will be taking legal action against the film, calling its contents “pure malicious defamation”. The film’s director Ali Abbasi responded by saying he doesn’t think Trump “would dislike” the movie and has offered to meet the former president, screen it for him and have a post-movie chat.
On the controversy front as well, one of the movie’s big investors, Dan Synder, who is also friends with Trump, donated $1.1 million dollars to the production, thinking it would paint him in a positive light, and was apparently furious with the final cut. He allegedly asked for specific scenes in the movie to be changed without luck.
The film reportedly depicts Trump raping his first wife Ivana (played by Maria Bakalova), which she initially alleged happened in 1989. Trump has denied these allegations. Ivana later took a step back and disavowed that it was rape in 2015, clarifying that on one occasion she and Trump had “marital relations in which he behaved very differently toward me than he had during our marriage” where she “felt violated”. Ivana died in 2022.
The Apprentice premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year to an 11-minute standing ovation and positive reviews from critics. During the EW interview, Strong also said he believes the movie is more focused on the relationship between Cohn and Trump and is “not a political movie.” He said:
It’s not telling you how to vote… If you are pro-Trump, if you’re anti-Trump, I think it’s a movie about the birth of his worldview and his moral, philosophical, and ethical framework. And I think that affects all of us.
So, while it’s hard to separate Trump from politics, according to the actors in this film, it does not take a political stand. To see the story they’re telling, you can catch The Apprentice in theaters on October 11.