Sebastian Stan has played a wide variety of characters so far in his career, but perhaps the most eye-catching of all comes this weekend, when his portrayal of a Donald Trump young and on the rise will be seen in the new film “The Apprentice” .
The film — which stars “Succession” award-winning actor Jeremy Strong as Trump’s former lawyer and right-hand man Roy Cohn and Oscar-nominated “Borat 2” star Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump — required Stan to study Trump’s early years to shape his interpretation.
“I think instinct is everything, and collaboration,” Stan said in a recent interview with CNN . “You have to go into it and look at what serves the story, the character, without judgment, all the good, the bad and the ugly.”
For Stan, the “noise” surrounding the former president and current Republican candidate for the US election next month was something he needed to distance himself from.
“You have to tune out the fear and all the noise that surrounds us right now,” he shared about how he focused on his performance.
Roy Cohn has been portrayed in other works, including last year’s Emmy-nominated “Fellow Travelers,” where he was played by Will Brill, and the award-winning 2003 HBO miniseries “Angels in America,” in which Cohn was played by Al Pacino .
Strong said his interpretation of Cohn came about by “osmosis” after studying the late lawyer “endlessly.”
“You obsess about it until it takes hold of you and takes possession of you, and then it comes out of you somehow,” Strong told CNN mentioning that he watched a lot of Cohn’s footage. “The way he looked at people and the way he behaved and those reptilian eyes and what was inside him, his soul and the turmoil and the self-denial and the hatred.”
“But it’s not like, ‘Now I’m going to put on this look and now I’m going to put on that.’ It’s all holistic,” he added. “Your job is to kind of learn and understand these people holistically, completely, dimensionally, and then you just walk on set and that’s how it comes out of you, without thinking about it.”
Understandably, the film “The Apprentice” was the subject of controversy. THE CNN reported in May, around the time of the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, that Trump’s team was considering legal action over the film’s release and distribution.
“This garbage is pure fiction that sensationalizes lies that have long been debunked,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement to CNN at the time.
In an interview with CNN the film’s director, Ali Abbasi, said: “I have to say that, for me, one of the most difficult things was how to organize this story,” he said, adding that it was a sprawling narrative with “so many characters who all seem very important.”
Abbasi said his response was to focus on the central relationship between the characters played by Stan and Strong — Trump and Cohn.
“We want to focus on this very specific relationship, the transformational relationship between him and Roy and see him transform through that and become the person we know today,” he said. “So that became the thread of the story, and we organized everything around that, and that was really helpful.”
“The Apprentice” hits cinemas in Brazil in October 17th.
Watch the trailer for “The Apprentice”
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This content was originally published in “The Apprentice” actor says how he played Donald Trump: “No judgments” on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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