Opening in the final weeks of an election cycle that eventually saw its subject Donald Trump re-elected as President of the United States, Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice” was one of 2024’s most controversial films. It became a political lightning rod to the point that Sebastian Stan, who played Trump in the 1980s-set film, reportedly couldn’t find a fellow actor willing to discuss it for Variety’s Actors on Actors series. But even if some people avoided the film, Stan is confident that Trump is a fan of it.
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Sebastian Stan speculated that the president has repeatedly watched “The Apprentice,” suggesting that the film’s critical tone might be lost on the former real estate mogul.
“I would put money down he’s seen it 100 fucking times, of course, because he’s a narcissist,” Stan said. “And I bet you there’s certain things he likes about it.”
When asked by Vanity Fair to elaborate on what parts of the film he imagines Trump enjoyed, Stan said, “How he looked.”
Stan previously spoke about the film’s political urgency in a recent interview with IndieWire, in which he explained that it’s a rare film that looks back on history while its major players are still in power.
“Usually what happens is you look at movies like ‘Nixon’ or the movie ‘Downfall,’ which is about Hitler, [the movies] happen years later. We’ve had time to process our emotions about it, and we’ve had some distance so we can go back and look at what went wrong or what we [believed] at the time,” Stan said. “You don’t have that luxury [with ‘The Apprentice’]. We don’t have the luxury of not dealing with this person.”
And Stan isn’t the only “The Apprentice” cast member to speculate about the impact (or lack thereof) that the film’s viewership had on America’s political landscape. Jeremy Strong, who plays Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn in the film, previously told GQ that he believes the 2024 presidential election could have swung differently if more young voters were exposed to the film.
“I’ve thought about this a lot. I mean, I’m someone who was deeply affected by watching certain movies when I was growing up, and in a lot of ways, they informed a lot of my worldview. I remember movies like ‘Mississippi Burning’ or ‘The Killing Fields’, or ‘Midnight Express,’” he said. “These kinds of movies had a huge impact on me. So I think certainly for a lot of the younger people who didn’t vote, it may have moved the needle.”
