CNN
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Sebastian Stan has played a wide range of characters over the course of his career, perhaps the most flashy of which came this weekend as the young, upwardly mobile Donald Trump in the new film The Apprentice. Dew.
The film co-stars award-winning “Succession” 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. But Stan had to look at Trump’s early days. Shape his portrayal.
“I think it’s all about intuition and collaboration,” Stan said in a recent CNN interview. “You have to go into it and see what serves the story and the characters without judgment, without judgment, with all the good, bad and ugly.”
For Stan, the “noise” surrounding the former president and current Republican candidate in next month’s election was something he needed to distance himself from.
“At the moment we need to distance ourselves from fear and all the noise that surrounds us,” he said of how he focused on his performance.
Cohn has appeared in other films, including Will Brill in last year’s Emmy-nominated film The Fellow Travelers, and Al Pacino in the award-winning 2003 HBO miniseries. Ta.
Mr. Strong said his view of Mr. Cohn came about by “osmosis” after studying the late lawyer “endlessly.”
“You become obsessed with it until it overtakes you and possesses you, and then somehow it comes out of you,” Strong told CNN, adding that he had watched a lot of video footage of Cohn. . “His view of people, his actions, his reptilian eyes, and his inner self, his soul, his turmoil, his self-denial, his hatred, his bitterness.”
“But it’s not like, ‘Now I’m going to wear this, now I’m going to wear that.’ It’s all holistic,” he added. “Your job is to learn and understand these people holistically, completely, dimensionally, and you just go on set and it just comes out of you without thinking. ”
Naturally, the movie “The Apprentice” was 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 trash is pure fiction, sensationalizing a long-debunked lie,” Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Chan said in a statement to CNN at the time.
The film’s director, Ali Abbasi, questioned whether American audiences would be able to see the film in an interview with CNN. Surprisingly, outside pressure regarding film distribution was not the biggest challenge he faced while making The Apprentice.
“The most difficult thing for me was figuring out how to structure this story,” he continued, adding that the film “has so many characters and everyone feels so important.” He added that it was a vast story.
Abbasi said his answer was to focus on the central relationship between Stan and Strong’s characters.
“We wanted to focus on this very special relationship, the transformative relationship between him and Roy, and watch him transform through it and become the person we know today. ” he said. “So that became the red thread of the whole story, and we organized everything around that. It was very helpful.”
“The Apprentice” is currently playing in theaters.
