This one could be bigly, to quote the 45th president. A first look at the highly-anticipated Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice has just dropped, with an image of Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as notorious lawyer Roy Cohn.
It seems the filmmakers decided to release the image following the recent news that the film will be included in the competition line-up for the prestigious Cannes Film Festival next month.
The Apprentice, from director Ali Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, follows Donald Trump's rise in the world of real estate during the 1970s and 80s in New York.
Deadline describes the independent film as “an exploration of power and ambition, set in a world of corruption and deceit.”
It further adds that The Apprentice “will examine Trump’s efforts to build his real estate business in New York in the ’70s and ’80s, also digging into his relationship with infamous attorney Cohn.”
The film is being pitched as “a mentor-protege story that charts the origins of a major American dynasty. Filled with larger than life characters, it will reveal the moral and human cost of a culture defined by winners and losers.”
The title of course alludes to Trump's later in life success as a reality television star as the face of the hit NBC show The Apprentice, which ran for 15 seasons.
But the film will focus on Trump's own rise as an apprentice of sorts. Trump owes much of his business career to the fortune and real estate empire he inherited from his father Fred Trump Sr., who will be played by Martin Donovan on screen.
Trump's relationship with his unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn also greatly shaped his early real estate empire. Cohn was infamous for defending Senator Joseph McCarthy during the communist “red scare” witch hunts of the 1950s, and later became a political fixer in New York City, where he represented Trump and allegedly also had mafia leaders as clients.
Is that really Jeremy Strong playing Roy Cohn?
Cohn has already been portrayed on-screen previously by the likes of Al Pacino, Nathan Lane and F. Murray Abraham — and now another award-winning actor, Jeremy Strong, will join that list.
Strong is best known for playing Kendall Roy on HBO's Succession but is almost unrecognizable in the first-look picture released for The Apprentice.
Sebastian Stan, meanwhile, is a Romanian-American actor with an eclectic resume who's probably best known for his role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — he's played Bucky Barnes / The Winter Soldier across numerous MCU films, including in a few of the Captain America and Avengers films.
He was a surprising choice to portray the polarizing president but he sure seems to look the part as he holds an 80s car phone to his ear and dons an on-point Trump wig and suit in the back of a town car (or limo, perhaps?).
Expectations will be high for The Apprentice, especially in the midst of the 2024 election season. It will be competing at Cannes against other high-profile films such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds and Andrea Arnold’s Bird.
Director Ali Abbasi is an Iranian-Danish filmmaker whose last film Holy Spider was also in competition at Cannes. On the more mainstream side of the industry, he also directed the last two episodes of the first season of HBO's The Last of Us.
Screenwriter Gabriel Sherman is a political journalist turned Hollywood scribe. He wrote the book The Loudest Voice in the Room, about the rise of Fox News' Roger Ailes, before then going on to write for the seven-part series adaptation, Showtime's The Loudest Voice.
Hailing from auspices like these, it's no surprise that audiences are buzzing over the first look at Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump and Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn in the Cannes hot-ticket The Apprentice.
Follow Us
Subscribe