‘The Apprentice’ Director Ali Abbasi on Channeling Empathy and Punk Energy Into His Kinetic Portrait of Donald Trump

Alci Rengifo

Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi has a thing for monsters. Outsiders and frightening deformities inhabit nearly all of his work. His latest film, “The Apprentice,” tells the story of a particularly dark friendship still casting a shadow over ongoing American history. For many in the United States, Donald Trump and Roy Cohn are instant villains. They embody our cultural and social divisions, corrupt ambition and power through dishonesty. Of course, it depends who you talk to. Abbasi’s riveting, kinetic telling of the friendship between Trump (Sebastian Stan) and Cohn (Jeremy Strong) will anger detractors and fans of these men. Critique and empathy run hand in hand in this film. The Trump we meet is a young upstart in 1970s New York, trying to get out of the shadow of his developer father. He meets Cohn at an exclusive Manhattan club, and is quickly swayed by the infamous lawyer’s take no prisoners attitude. It is Cohn who begins to shape Trump into the controversial, brash figure we know today, guiding him in the ways of admitting nothing while shaping reality.

Abbasi is at home with outsiders. His 2018 breakthrough, “Border,” is a fantasy about a customs officer in Europe who belongs to an ogre-like species. In 2022 he made the excellent “Holy Spider,” a dark profile of a serial killer murdering sex workers in Iran, convinced that he is a divine agent of judgment. Abbasi directs dynamic performances from Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong that turn Trump and Cohn into larger than life, yet human personalities. “One way of looking at it is to talk about them as monsters, the other way is to talk about them as ‘the other,’” Abbasi tells Entertainment Voice. “The way you define the other is the boundary of yourself. When I looked at these characters and read the first version of the script, I was fascinated with how different their value set is from my value set. At the same time, I completely understand what they’re doing.” 

For the director, empathy is key to this story. “I feel for them as human beings. I think their pain is real. I think their joy is real,” he says. “That creates this very morally ambiguous, complex situation. It’s not unlike ‘Holy Spider’ in a way, where I have empathy for someone who I really don’t want to have it for. I’m trying to understand how they became the people they are. People don’t come out of bushes. There’s always a context and a system and relationships that form you. To sort of explore that transformation is not only relevant politically, but also I think there’s a lot of meat there.”

Like many important figures, Trump and Cohn are tuned into their times, eventually defining them to an extent. Abbasi presents late ‘70s New York as a bustling terrain of ambition and political sharks. The Reagan era is just around the corner, the soundtrack drives along with a mixture of disco and punk. “The ‘70s and ‘80s saw the birth of punk rock and the new conservatism at the same time,” says Abbasi. “These larger than life characters are contradictory and fantastic with this as the backdrop. There’s a lot to catch up to.” The screenplay by journalist Gabriel Sherman does not hold back at peering behind the public poses of a ruthless operator like Cohn, to look at the party animal beneath the expensive suits. He has sex with young men at coke-fueled parties, while publicly acting homophobic. He is a man without friends who genuinely likes Trump, straddled with his own demons at home. When Trump meets and wishes to marry Czech model Ivana (Maria Bakalova), Cohn instantly intervenes to handle the prenup.

These are astounding performances that never feel like imitation. “These are all performers at the top of their game,” says Abbasi about the dynamic cast. “The way Maria prepares, Jeremy prepares, Sebastian prepares is different. They have their methods. They have their quirks which they are dependent on. At the same time, I feel I want to create a certain energy or atmosphere on set that will include everyone. I want us to achieve the same result, the same goal that is to create live on set, on the spot, as it happens. What’s important is that there’s an openness and willingness to play with the material, to improvise and still keep it within what we’re trying to do. I’m not interested in free jazz either. They did it in different ways, but were skilled enough and generous enough to navigate this and help me not to deviate too much. At the same time, some things that might be helpful for Sebastian might not be helpful for Jeremy and vice versa. You have to navigate that as a director.”

The release of “The Apprentice” could not occur without controversy, as befits its subjects. Trump’s lawyers sent Abbasi a cease and desist letter while filming. Its release date was nearly decided at the last minute, after a distribution deal was signed on Labor Day with Briarcliff. There was a major hold up in clinching a deal due to concerns from the film’s biggest investor, Mark Rapaport, whose billionaire father-in-law is Dan Snyder, a big Trump donor. Now that the film is coming to theaters almost a month before Election Day, as Trump hopes to return to the White House, Abbasi tells us, “I still want Mr. Trump to watch it with his family, or alone if he prefers it that way. It’s funny that it has become a movie that he doesn’t want people to watch, and I’m curious as to why.” 

In the end, whether Trump returns to Washington, D.C. or not, he casts a shadow, as does Cohn. For Abbasi, the infamous blonde has a particular appeal. “The movie is about punk rock characters. Mr. Trump is a punk rock character, and so am I. I’m trying to match him. I’m trying to match his energy. Let’s see how it goes (laughs).” 

“The Apprentice” releases Oct. 11 in theaters nationwide.