Sebastian Stan, who plays Donald Trump in the film “The Apprentice,” made his strongest comments against Trump of this election cycle on the eve of Election Day.
During a taping of The Hollywood Reporter’s “Awards Chatter” podcast on Monday, Stan urged voters to watch “The Apprentice,” director Ali Abbasi’s controversial film about the mentor-mentee relationship between Trump, a young real estate developer, and Roy Cohn, a lawyer and right-wing political operative, in the 1970s and 80s, on V.O.D. before Election Day. Trump has called the film “fake and classless” and “a disgusting hatchet job,” and the film struggled to find a distributor. Stan encouraged people to watch the movie to see the truth of what it is.
“You have the right to be curious and know what there is to know,” the actor, aan awards contender for his performance, said. “What is really so controversial about this film? I mean, I think what’s the scariest part is our own level of denial of reality at this point. If you want to really know, it’s out there, it’s all been documented for the last 30, 40 years. Everything that’s in this film has been documented and it’s out there.”
“There’s people that are going to say, ‘We don’t know what the truth is anymore.’ That’s the problem!” Stan continued. “[Trump] has muddled it up so much… You can create your own truth at this point, believe what you want, and that’s what people are doing. But I think if you really care, you can still find it.”
Stan said film is, in a way, more persuasive than simply being told the truth because it can make the viewer feel it. “I can sit here and tell you things you’ve heard already for, like, 30,000 hours, and it’s not really going to make a difference,” Stan said. “You hear facts, we all hear information, but you don’t experience it. It’s the experience of being with this person for two hours, and seeing where he’s coming from, and really asking yourself at the end of this film, ‘Do you trust this person? Do you really trust that this guy is going to make a decision that’s going to be good for you or good for him?’ And let me tell you something: There is one paranoid, scared little man that’s still out there fighting the good fight to get into the membership club of Manhattan and be put on a plaque on a wall. He ain’t caring about your situation. It’s that he‘s got to get there first. And that’s just what the film is.”
Stan, who was born in Romania and immigrated to the New York City suburbs with his mother when he was 12, described his “The Apprentice” as being about the American dream, which he is the embodiment of. “What essentially started with my sort of dismissive, judgmental attitude of this guy started to shape into something bigger, which was not just about this guy, but also about a certain mindset and this idea of the American dream as we know it, and what is it, really? Because I had been obsessing about it since my mom, in New York City, pointed to the Twin Towers, and all around us, and said, ‘This is the promised land, this is the land of the free, this is the land of opportunity. This is where you can become someone. And I sacrificed my life for you to get here.’ And so I have always been in love with this idea. I am sort of an example of the American dream. I’ve lucked out.”
But pursuing the American dream comes at a cost, and the story of Donald Trump is about the dark side of it. “The movie was asking the question, ‘What is the cost?’ And this man was sort of a really good example of what can happen as a result when you lose who you are because you are so focused on one thing and that nothing else matters, not even your humanity.”
