“We realized that if we get too close, we’re in Saturday Night Live territory. But if we get too far away, you don’t really feel it,” Abbasi says. They achieved a middle ground by avoiding any biopic gloss: “This is not a movie where people are supposed to look good.” The makeup and hair are meticulous in their glaring imperfections, reinforcing Abbasi’s focus on physical decay and patchwork: “These people are some of the most powerful people in New York society at the time,” says Abbasi. Yet “Roy’s face looks strange, gray, brownish, his eyes are bloodshot, his forehead is shiny. Donald has strange teeth and looks unhealthy.”
Each portrayal has its own curious empathy. Stan charts Trump’s descent into power-driven madness subtly, emphasizing his relative humanity and emotional range before hitting nightmarishly familiar beats later in the film. As he gains influence and emerges as a dominant cultural force, Trump all but abandons Cohn, who’s not-so-secretly dying from HIV-AIDS.
Unlike, say, Al Pacino’s loud, flamboyant take on Cohn in Angels in America, Strong’s approach is mournful. “I’ll say unequivocally that he’s the most fascinating person I’ve ever studied,” Strong says. “I found myself moved by the arc of the character when he got sick. Someone who has lived in denial of so much, suddenly facing the end, and the searing regret and primal pain of that for someone who’s done so much damage. I don’t think he particularly felt much remorse, but he was a person.”
Ivana, meanwhile, acts as the initial wedge between the two men. Bakalova connected with her story, as a headstrong immigrant thrust into a dizzying, at times brutal world of celebrity and wealth. “I wanted to see what she saw in him, why she got impressed by him,” she says. The film doesn’t paint Ivana as a victim, even as it bluntly depicts the darkest moments of her marriage to Trump. “I keep questioning myself: ‘How did she agree to that?’ But maybe she knew what she was stepping into,” Bakalova says. “It’s another side of her being intelligent—somebody that I can, of course, criticize in moments, and also empathize with.”
“People think of Trump as this kind of fully formed tabloid figure—they think of the person they see at the rallies giving all these unhinged speeches,” Sherman says. “But the Trump of the ’70s was a very different person. While he was aggressive and he was ambitious, he did not know how to project power the way he does today. We need to understand how people like Cohn and Trump are able to wield power and manipulate the truth and create their own reality through deception. That’s a universal story.”
This is but one answer to the question looming around The Apprentice: Why make a Trump movie, and why now? He’s been sucking the oxygen out of Hollywood for going on a decade; even now, his fraught reelection campaign is moving forward while he stands criminal trial. But both Sherman and Abbasi emphasize they wanted to “strip politics” from their movie, to craft a dark character study that speaks to a larger, darker system of power in the US.
It may be difficult for viewers to remove the political context, especially as the movie teases the Trump phenomenon that will emerge out of this period—the absurdist characters now in his orbit who previously circled Cohn, the now groan-inducing catchphrases packaged over decades. At a press conference on Tuesday, Cannes’s jury president Greta Gerwig was asked about her ability to “objectively” assess the film as an American woman, and said, “I try to come to every film that we see with an open mind and an open heart, and willing to be surprised…. I don’t want to make any assumptions about what it is.”
The filmmakers hope general audiences adopt a similar attitude. There are thorny ideas and bold arguments in The Apprentice that will stick with you. The same goes for the characters, who are simultaneously vile and sad and slightly silly. “I’m a very all-or-nothing kind of person when it comes to the work stuff,” Stan says. “It’s hard for me to go with one foot in and one foot out.”
Stan spent much of production wondering what exact tone they’d land on, given the latitude they had with the script. That spontaneity informed the final product. “The shoot was pretty ride-or-die. It was fast. We didn’t have a lot of money,” Strong says. “You can’t imagine a bigger limb to go out on for either of us. I think we both felt that.”
The Apprentice premieres Monday, May 20. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive Cannes Film Festival 2024 coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth features on some of the festival’s most exciting debuts.
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