No one knew if the Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice would make it to America. The film, which premiered three months ago at the Cannes Film Festival, ended the event without a US distributor, and those behind the former president’s second attempt to take the White House threatened legal action in an attempt to shut the movie down. But director Ali Abbasi says that the Trump camp’s bluster is misplaced, as he believes the digital playing card huckster might even enjoy how Sebastian Stan portrays him.
It’s a bold claim, given the aggressive stance Donald Trump’s defenders have taken against the movie, which depicts his rise—fueled by mentor Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong)—in the New York real estate world of the 1970s and 80s. According to a May 20 statement from Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung, “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked. As with the illegal Biden Trials, this is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked.”
“This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should not see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire,” Chung continued.
But according to Abbasi, the movie (written by Vanity Fair special correspondent Gabriel Sherman) is the sort of thing that Trump might actually like. Speaking with the Hollywood Reporter, Abbasi says that the movie is “relatively fair and balanced, in terms of accuracy of character,” and that “I think Mr. Trump, at the end of the day, is a very smart person” who “would appreciate a lot of the nuances here.”
Stan, who plays Trump, also says that the movie could find an unexpected audience. “I’ve had actually a lot of Republican friends who are very excited about the film,” he said, even though it depicts Trump under the knife for various plastic surgeries, and contains a scene based on Ivana Trump’s later withdrawn allegations that her then-husband had physically and sexually abused her.
An uncomfortable scene to sit through under any circumstances, let alone next to the alleged assailant. But Abbasi is ready for that challenge, saying, “I would love to show him the movie.” That said, the Apprentice team isn’t expecting movie theaters to be emblazoned with Trump endorsements when it premieres on October 11.
“I think privately, there’s a lot for him to like in this movie. It does speak to a time in his life when he was actually building real things,” Sherman says. “I think publicly, it serves his political interests to pick fights with anyone, and we might be those people.”
“If he attacks the movie, it’s only because he thinks he’s going to score political points,” Sherman says, as so much of it is about a time in Trump’s life when he was universally applauded, not reviled.
“People perhaps like to forget that he was on Oprah and David Letterman and Larry King, and everybody embraced him and was championing him to be who he was in the eighties,” Stan says. “Trump and Roy, in these years, the seventies and eighties, were embraced by New York liberal society,” Sherman adds. “They were fun to be around. The danger and the sense of their infamy made people like Barbara Walters and others want to spend time with them. And it all seems like fun and games to be with these rogue, outside characters, until we see what happens when Trump becomes president.”
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Publish date : 2024-09-02 05:50:00
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