Trump Biopic That Trump Campaign Didn’t Want People to See Will Hit Theaters in October
The trailer for The Apprentice dropped on Tuesday after a lot of behind-the-scenes drama.
Briarcliff Entertainment Politics Donald Trump
The 2000s reality competition show The Apprentice made Donald Trump into even more of a household name and propped up the fiction that Trump was a great businessman, rather than simply a grifter and a tax cheat. And there’s an argument to be made that the image of him peddled by the show helped him win the presidency in 2016. Now, as Trump runs for president a third consecutive time, Americans might see a much different take on the TV show in the form of a biopic that’s being marketed as a “dark and chilling origin story.”
The trailer for The Apprentice was released on Tuesday and the movie hits theaters on October 11, a little more than three weeks before Election Day—and it almost didn’t happen.
The film depicts Trump (played by Sebastian Stan) as being mentored by fixer Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong), the cutthroat former lawyer for nationalist Sen. Joe McCarthy and, later, for mob bosses. Trump then abandons Cohn after he develops AIDS. The Hollywood Reporter said the movie “contains several disturbing and profoundly unflattering scenes, including a sequence where he rapes his first wife Ivana, gets liposuction and surgery for his bald spot, becomes addicted to diet pills and betrays the trust of many of those closest to him.” (Ivana made that allegation in a 1990 divorce deposition, but later recanted. Maria Bakalova plays her in the movie.)