'I'm fine with people beating us up': Inside the controversial Trump biopic

i amn 1973, Donald Trump was a hungry, awkward real estate heir from Queens who sought respectability in New York. Not particularly smart, not particularly charming and with no solid plan to fight a federal lawsuit against the family company's discrimination against black tenants, the young Trump rushed toward his dream of opening a luxury hotel near Grand Central. That is, until he met Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy's prosecutor turned Richard Nixon confidant and political fixer, at a glamorous New York club.

That's the opening scene of The Apprentice, a new movie after a bumpy ride in theaters this month. Written by Vanity Fair's longtime Trump chronicler Gabriel Sherman and directed by Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi, the film depicts the young Trump's ascent in New York society in the 1970s and '80s through Cohn's brazen machinations, as the lawyer's health falters due to HIV. /AIDS. Starring D-Handsome Sebastian Stan as Trump and Legacy's Jeremy Strong as Cohn, the question asked: Does anyone want to see a Trump movie? And after the film settled into a long period of distribution uncertainty following some positive reviews at the Cannes Film Festival in May – will be Will anyone be able to see it?

“I'm fine with people bashing us, praising us, whatever,” Abbasi, who previously made the serial killer thriller Holy Spider, said. “What I'm not good at, what really hurts, is the boycott or censorship that, effectively, we've gone through.”

Even with two big stars attached, the independent film had a bumpy road to theaters. After the film's festival premiere, the Trump camp issued a cease-and-desist letter — not surprising, given the former president's judgment and the film's content. The Apprentice includes, among other things, raping his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova), with fictional accounts of an alleged 1989 assault — and liposuction. Dan Snyder, a pro-Trump billionaire with ties to Kinematics, the company that put up equity for the film against domestic rights, reportedly wanted to block its release. Perhaps spooked by legal threats, various studios and streamers pass. At the 11th hour, Briarcliff Entertainment jumped in with a domestic distribution plan and awards push, though the filmmakers still sought $100,000 in a Kickstarter campaign (dubbed “Student Release”).

According to Abbasi, who lives in Copenhagen, the issue of distribution was the juicy story of a right-wing billionaire and was getting the way of unrepentant liars rather than simple corporate logic: “Whatever makes money, not what doesn't. Interesting.” That being said, people will see the movie, but it may turn off more Maga customers or customers. “For all the liberals on the surface of Hollywood — and I'm not saying they're lying or anything — but I don't think they're any. Willing to enter politics in a big, meaningful way,” Abbasi said.

The movie, from the start, has been a tough sell. “Trumpland thinks we're making a hit about Trump, but when we were making the movie, all our liberal friends in Hollywood, they thought we were giving him too much oxygen,” Abbasi said. “People hung up on us when we were teaming up, because we didn't hate Trump enough.”

To be clear, Sherman was the first to capture and write about the image in 2017 — a US president long before Cohn's rules of “attack, attack, attack,” “admit nothing, deny everything” and “never admit defeat.” Attempts to steal were revealed. The election won't be easy for Trump. It is a dramatization based on the historical record, which is as damning as you look at it. (For people outside the Maga-verse, that's pretty damning.) But it's trying to do what might be impossible in America right now: talk about Trump without any political baggage, putting aside feelings for the man in the name of truth-based art. “It wasn't written to sway people's minds,” Sherman said. “It is written as art and what people take from it is their own choice.

“It's such a universal story about the apprentice outsmarting the master,” he added. “I hope people can experience it on their own terms and not bring all their political baggage to it.”

Apprentice is no stranger to paying attention to Trump outside of his recent political career. The film depicts her icy, frustrating relationship with her father (Martin Donovan); his more affectionate relationship with his alcoholic older brother Fred (Charlie Carrick), who died in 1981; his love affair with Ivana; And Kohn's blind eye to homosexuality and his attempt to bash respect. And perhaps most egregious, his deceptions, solutions, and outright lies—to the housing board, to the press—that worked because they aligned with the interests of others and the means by which New York's elite gave legitimacy to a blowhard. (A New York Times profile that compares Trump to Robert Redford, read aloud by his mother Mary, is lifted directly from an actual article that helped build Trump's reputation as a legitimate New York businessman.)

“There's a system, a social Darwinism that's built into American society, that didn't come with Trump and won't end with Trump,” said Abbasi, who maintains The Apprentice is “not a Trump movie.” It's about Donald Trump becoming the person we know him to be today through these specific times and specific relationships.”

Over the course of the film, Trump, played by Stan as exaggeratedly as one could possibly do, became more and more like the recognizable figure he is today – bigger and with more bluster, acting with increasingly little sense of consequence. The most disturbing scene to watch – and the one that grabbed the headlines from Cannes – is the rape of Ivana in the late 1980s.

“I felt the movie had to address that aspect of his character — it would be a whitewash of a movie if we didn't acknowledge that in some way,” Sherman said, noting that Trump has credibly been accused of sexual assault at the very least. A dozen women, and former Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll, were held liable by a New York jury. The episode in question was drawn from Ivana's own divorce deposition in 1990, behind closed doors and under oath. (Ivana, who died in 2022, later gave conflicting statements, though Sherman noted that they were under pressure from Trump's lawyers and, ultimately, the campaign team.) The history is there – let's look at it, let's get people to actually see what it's like,” he said.

It was one of several tough scenes to stomach, though one that made light of Trump's well-documented misconduct and naturally drew the ire of Republicans. Former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has publicly called for a boycott of “anti-Trump” films. (“They do the First Amendment when it suits them, their free speech when it's about fascism,” Abbasi said of Huckabee and his ilk.)

Trump stepped aside, The Apprentice still faces an uphill battle with viewers. ABC and CBS refused to air spots for the film during the campaign controversy, a decision Briarcliff blamed on “cowardice and cowardice”. And then there's the hurdle of enticing an audience to watch a two-hour film about a man that most Americans have a certain opinion of and a solid half would prefer to see less of. “People are coming into this movie with a lot of preconceptions,” admits Sherman, “but if they allow themselves to sit in the theater and be surprised, I think they're going to have a really exciting time.”

Both Abbasi and Sherman portray The Apprentice as many things: a New York movie about a bygone, dull, formative era. The story of a destructive system. A classic student becomes a teacher story. An original story. But it is first and foremost a dramatic portrait of Donald Trump, the person. Trump “is not an alien, he is not from another planet. He's human,” Sherman said. “We have to look at these people, even if you don't agree with them, so that the next time maybe another Trump comes along we can recognize them as that.”

Ultimately, like any movie, the film is up to interpretation. “I think the audience is really smart,” Abbasi said. “They can make up their own minds, if they come and give it a chance.”