No one knows if Donald Trump biographical film Apprentice will come to the US. The film, which premiered three months ago at the Cannes Film Festival, ended the event without a US distributor, and the people behind the former president’s second attempt to seize the White House have threatened legal action to shut it down. But the director Ali Abbasi said the Trump camp’s hyperbole was misplaced, as he believed the digital poker scammer might even enjoy the way Sebastian Stan describe him
It’s a bold statement, given the hardline stance Donald Trump’s defenders have taken toward the film depicting his rise — promoted by his mentor Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong)—in the New York real estate world of the 1970s and 80s. According to a May 20 statement from a Trump spokesman Steven Truong“This garbage is pure fiction, sensationalizing long-debunked lies. Just like the illegitimate Biden Trial, this is election interference by Hollywood elites who know that President Trump will take back the White House and defeat their candidate of choice because nothing they do is working.”
Chung continued: “This ‘movie’ is pure malicious defamation, should not have been published, and does not even deserve to be placed in the cheap DVD section of a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in the trash heap.”
But according to Abbasi, the film (produced by Vanity Fair Special Correspondent Gabriel Sherman) is the kind of thing Trump might actually like. Talk to Hollywood Reporter, Abbasi said the film was “relatively fair and balanced, in terms of character accuracy” and that “I think Mr. Trump, after all, is a very intelligent person” and “will appreciate a lot of the nuances here.”
Stan, who plays Trump, also said the film could find an unexpected audience. “I actually have a lot of Republican friends who are excited about the movie,” he said, despite the film depicting Trump undergoing multiple plastic surgeries and a scene based on Ivana Trump’s later accusation that her husband physically and sexually abused her.
An uncomfortable sight to sit in under any circumstances, let alone next to an alleged attacker. But Abbasi was up for the challenge, saying, “I will Love to show him the movie.” That said, Apprentice The group does not expect theaters to be flooded with pro-Trump imagery when the film opens on October 11.
“I think privately, there’s a lot he likes about this movie. It speaks to a time in his life when he was really building real things,” Sherman said. “I think publicly, it’s in his political interest to be at odds with anybody, and we could be those people.”
“If he attacks the film, it’s only because he thinks he’s scoring political points,” Sherman said, since much of the film is about a time in Trump’s life when he was applauded rather than criticized.
“People probably want to forget that he was ever Oprah And David Letterman and Larry King, and everyone was rooting for him and cheering him on to be who he was in the eighties,” Stan said. “Trump and Roy, in those years, the seventies and eighties, were embraced by the New York liberal community,” Sherman added. “They were fun to be around. Their danger and their sense of notoriety made people like Barbara Walters and others want to spend time with them. And it all seemed like fun and games to be around these outside, crooked characters, until we saw what happened when Trump became president.”
