LOS ANGELES: Sebastian Stan immersed himself 24/7 in Donald Trump’s early life to research the new biopic “The Apprentice” – and came to an unexpected realisation.
“A lot of the behaviour and the personality is much more relatable than we want to admit,” said the Hollywood star, who has won critical acclaim for his uncanny performance.
The film, which opens in US cinemas on Friday weeks before its subject’s election showdown with Kamala Harris, first screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where it drew huge controversy and legal threats from the ex-president, particularly for a scene in which Trump is shown raping his first wife.
But much of the film portrays a younger Trump as a nervous, naive outsider from New York’s outer boroughs, trying to find his way in a cutthroat and elite Manhattan world he knows little about.
It is an approach sure to surprise, or even anger, anyone expecting or wanting a left-wing political hatchet job.
For Stan, who was born in communist Romania and did not move to the United States until he was 12, that sense of Trump striving to belong resonated.
“My mother told me that I had to become somebody,” he told AFP in an interview at the Cannes festival in May. “There was a lot of shame, when I grew up, coming from Romania… ‘don’t tell people’ and ‘blend in’.”
The 42-year-old has rocketed to fame in recent years, in large part due to his role as the Winter Soldier in a number of blockbuster Marvel superhero films. But Stan drew parallels between his mother’s message, and the intense pressure put on Trump and his brothers by their brutally tough father Fred.
As the film starts, Donald Trump is failing to convince his father that he can pull off a daring hotel deal. Instead it is Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), a formidable lawyer with powerful political connections, who believes in the young property developer, taking him under his wing.
While Trump is initially queasy about Cohn’s willingness to “violate a few technicalities”, he quickly adopts and even surpasses his mentor’s embrace of the dark arts in pursuit of fame.
The movie shows how “anyone that grows up in America” can be corrupted by a capitalist society that rewards greed, ruthlessness and ambition, said Stan.
“Nothing is ever good enough. You look at people achieving things, but there’s always more, you’ve got to have more,” he added.
The hardest scene?
Stan prepared for the role by devouring magazine interviews, watching videos, and obsessively listening to audio of Trump from the late 1970s and early 1980s. He would listen “non-stop”, whether driving, walking, shopping or even “on headphones in the bathroom”.
Stan tried to avoid the many “Saturday Night Live”-style parodies of later-era Trump, noting that he “just had to put the noise away”.
As the role called on Stan to gain weight as the years progress, he “tried to eat as much as I could” before certain shoots. Because not everything was shot in sequence, other scenes required prosthetics.
And then there is the much-talked-about rape scene. It occurs after an argument, in which Trump’s first wife Ivana belittles him for growing fat and bald. In real life, Ivana accused Trump of raping her during divorce proceedings but later rescinded the allegation.
Stan said preparing for that scene did not particularly trouble him. Instead, “the hardest scene that I was always afraid of” was another in which Trump mourns the loss of his older brother Freddy, an alcoholic who died at age 42.
Trump is shown genuinely caring for Freddy as well as Ivana, before his humanity is eroded by the power and wealth that devours him. “It’s interesting how much we don’t want to remember about him,” Stan said.
None of the major Hollywood studios was willing to risk distributing the polarising film, which is instead being released in some 1,700 North American movie theatres this weekend by indie studio Briarcliff Entertainment.
“I think it’s interesting that people think this movie is controversial,” said director Ali Abbasi at the film’s New York premiere this week, which was attended by Stan and Strong.
“Think about it. We’re talking about a person who is actually convicted in civil court of sexual assault.”
