‘The Apprentice’ star Sebastian Stan reveals what he relied on to play a young Donald Trump: ‘Instinct is everything’

By Dan Heching and Richard Damigella, CNN

(CNN) — Sebastian Stan has played a wide array of characters thus far in his career, but perhaps the showiest of them all comes this weekend, when his portrayal of a young and upwardly mobile Donald Trump is showcased in the new film “The Apprentice.”

The movie, which costars award-winning “Succession” actor Jeremy Strong as Trump’s former attorney and right hand man Roy Cohn, as well as Oscar-nominated “Borat 2” star Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump, required Stan to observe Trump’s early years to shape his portrayal.

“I think instinct is everything, and collaboration,” Stan said in a recent interview with CNN. “You have to go into that and look at what serves the story, the character, without judgment, (without) all the good, the bad and the ugly.”

For Stan, the “noise” surrounding the former president and current Republican candidate for next month’s election was something he had to distance himself from.

”You have to detach from fear and all of the noise that’s surrounding us at this time,” he shared about how he focused in on his performance.

Cohn has been portrayed other works, including last year’s Emmy-nominated “Fellow Travelers,” where he was portrayed by Will Brill, and 2003’s award-winning HBO miniseries “Angels in America,” in which Cohn was played by Al Pacino.

Strong said his take on Cohn came about via “osmosis” after studying the late attorney “endlessly.”

“You become obsessed with it until it overtakes you and takes possession of you, and then that comes out of you somehow,” Strong told CNN, mentioning that he watched plenty of video footage of Cohn. “The way he looked at people and the way his behavior and those reptilian eyes and what was inside of him, his soul and the turmoil and self denial and hatred and vitriol.”

“But it’s not like, ‘Now I’m gonna put on this look and now I’m gonna put on that. It’s just all holistic,” he added. “Your job is to sort of learn and understand these people holistically, fully, dimensionally, and then you just walk onto the set and that’s how it comes out of you, without thinking about it.”

Understandably, the film “The Apprentice” has met with controversy. CNN reported in May, around the time of the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, that Trump’s team was considering a lawsuit over the film’s release and distribution.

“This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said in a statement to CNN at the time.

In an interview with CNN, the film’s director Ali Abbasi questioned whether US audiences would ever get to see it. Surprisingly, the external pressures regarding distribution of the film weren’t the biggest challenges he met with while making “The Apprentice.”

“I have to say that for me, some of the most difficult ones were how to organize this story,” he continued, adding that it was a sprawling narrative with “so many characters that all feel very important.”

Abbasi said his answer was to zoom in on the central relationship between the characters played by Stan and Strong.

“We want to focus on this very specific relationship, the transformational relationship between him and Roy and see him become transformed through that and become the person who we know today,” he said. “So that became the red thread through the story, and we organized everything around it, and that was very helpful.”

“The Apprentice” is now playing in theaters.

The-CNN-Wire
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