According to Sebastian Stan, Donald Trump Is ‘a Lot Smarter’ than People Realize

In a new Variety cover story, the actor certainly had some…thoughts on portraying the former president.

By Audra Heinrichs  |  September 20, 2024 | 3:06pm
Photo: Dominik Bindl, Getty Images Notable/Quotable, Sebastian Stan
According to Sebastian Stan, Donald Trump Is ‘a Lot Smarter’ than People Realize

On Thursday, Variety unveiled Sebastian Stan as this month’s cover star. The accompanying story sees the actor defending the Marvel industrial complex (“Sometimes I get protective of it because the intention is really fucking good.”), musing on the ever-illusive American Dream™ (“You can become whoever you want, if you just have a good idea.”) and waxing poetic about his first “serious love” (read: Leighton Meester). Stan also spent at least 300 words making the case for Ali Abbas’s forthcoming film, The Apprentice, in which he portrays a young Donald Trump.

“When someone says, ‘Why do we need this movie? We know all this,’ I’ll say, ‘Maybe you do, but you haven’t experienced it,'” Stan told the publication. “The experience of those two hours is visceral. It’s something you can hopefully feel—if you still have feelings.” I’m sorry, what??? When it comes to Trump, I think we’ve all felt quite enough, no? Unfortunately, Stan doesn’t stop there.

The film follows Trump throughout his early years as a businessman and his relationship to none other than, Roy Cohn, the New York City prosecutor who first taught him to “attack, counterattack and never apologize.”

“The script is 100% backed by my own interviews and historical research,” Gabriel Sherman, a journalist and the film’s screenwriter, told Variety. “And it’s important to note that it is not a documentary. It’s a work of fiction that’s inspired by history.”

When preparing to portray Trump, Stan shared that he gained fifteen pounds and went so far as to show a selfie in which he posed shirtless in a mirror and pouting as if in mourning of the transformation. He also studied the former president’s physicality, saving “130 videos” to his phone and “562 videos” that chronicled the many changes its undergone from the 1970’s to the present. But it wasn’t just Trump’s appearance that Stan had thoughts on…

“I think he’s a lot smarter than people want to say about him,” Stan said. “Because he repeats things consistently, and he’s given you a brand.” And that brand is…lie profusely, spout racist, sexist, and homophobic rhetoric ad nauseam, sexually assault scores of women, etc. etc. Smart, indeed.

And speaking of sexual assault, Stan then ever-so-slightly commented on a scene that depicts Trump raping his first wife, Ivana Trump. Its inclusion in the film, of course, created quite the controversy at its first screening in Cannes. When asked about the scene, Stan told Variety that Ivana had claimed her then-husband had raped her during a 1990 divorce deposition, but later said she didn’t want her “words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”

“Is it closer to the truth, what she had said directly in the deposition or something that she retracted?” Stan hypothetically prompted. “They went with the first part.” They, of course, refers to The Apprentice team.

After the film debuted at Cannes, the Washington Post reported that lawyers for the Trump campaign sent a cease and desist letter to Sherman and director Ali Abbasi, claiming the movie constituted defamation and foreign election interference. The campaign also pledged that they would sue those involved. No such suit has materialized.

Personally, I still haven’t decided if I actually care to see The Apprentice just yet, and this interview didn’t help much.

 
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