'The Apprentice' stars Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, and Maria Bakalova, along with its director Ali Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, take EW inside the making of this year's most controversial film.
Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong take EW inside the making of a film so controversial, no major Hollywood studio would touch it.was getting nervous. After five years of preparation and delays, the Iranian Danish filmmaker was finally rolling on what would become this year's most controversial film, the Trump origin story"I was looking at them like, 'Wow, they look weird, man. Is this going to work?'" Abbasi tellsa year later, from Copenhagen.
"If those two hadn't met, everything might be different," Strong says of Cohn and Trump's fateful 1973 encounter, which plays out in the film's opening scenes. "I really think it's that portentous and that significant." "Right from there, I felt like, 'Okay, we are both going to go for this 100 percent,'" Stan says. "I never saw him out of costume, and he never saw me out of costume. We never really met or spoke outside of the scenes or when we were on set." After they finished filming, Stan went to see his costar's Tony-winning performance of Henrik Ibsen'son Broadway.
While his films can be fantastical, Abbasi — making his English-language debut here — strives to uncover deeper truths in his work. "I love reality. I don't watch that many movies and TV shows anymore," he says. "I watch a lot of YouTube and TikTok to see what I think is a depiction of reality." That approach informed's unique visual style, which evokes news footage from the '70s and '80s.
When it came to the physical aspect of becoming Trump, Abbasi says he had a"narrow path to navigate." If he added"10 percent more" prosthetics, it would"look like." But if he went 10 percent less, it would"just be Sebastian in a wig." The tinkering continued until the cameras rolled. Opening the door to that kind of improvisation meant the actors had to be "extremely well-read in terms of not just our characters, but also the time period and what was happening in New York," Stan explains. To prepare, he memorized everything from the names of local politicians to the players on the New York Mets over the film's decade-plus time span.
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