Both candidates in the US presidential race have movies coming soon that tell their respective stories, but only one has attracted considerable controversy in the lead-up to its pre-Election Day release. That would be director Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice — which stars Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump and features a scene in which Stan’s Trump rapes his wife Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova).
Voters will get a chance to see the movie less than a month before the 2024 election, when The Apprentice finally hits theaters on Oct. 11 after somewhat of a long gestation for obvious reasons. Trump’s team threatened to sue the movie out of existence, for one thing, and billionaire Trump friend Dan Snyder actually helped fund the movie’s production before realizing it wouldn’t be a flattering portrayal and likewise threatened legal action.
The Apprentice, reads the official description from the Cannes festival, “is a dive into the underbelly of the American empire. It charts a young Donald Trump’s ascent to power through a Faustian deal with the influential right-wing lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn.” It was written by Vanity Fair scribe Gabriel Sherman, not exactly a friend to conservatives, and it aims for a mostly simplistic characterization of the Trump psyche — namely, the cynical winners vs. losers prism through which The Donald supposedly views the world.
The performances are already drawing rave reviews, particularly Succession’s Jeremy Strong as Cohn, the shady lawyer-fixer who becomes something of a father figure to Trump in his early days as a young real estate developer. The Apprentice more or less sets out to tell Trump’s origin story, drawing a straight line from the dealmaking real estate mogul who trades one overweening father for a mendacious and much darker replacement in the form of Cohn, the McCarthy-era monster who taught Trump the most important lesson of his life: How to make it in America.
