Your support helps us to tell the story
This election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.
The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.
Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.
Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan, who star in new Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice, have called the former president’s reaction to the film “ridiculous” but accused him of using similar language to the likes of Hitler.
Stan and Strong star in the film, which focuses on Trump’s early career as a real estate entrepreneur guided by controversial lawyer Roy Cohn, a closested gay man who had a colourfully complicated personal life and a Rasputin-like grip on United States politics.
The movie, which has already been released in the United States, has already been attacked by Trump, who said that it was “so sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement, which is far bigger than any of us”.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Strong said that Trump’s reaction was in a way an “endorsement” of the movie and that the film is now “intersecting itself with Trump, history and politics in real time”.
The Succession actor did condemn Trump’s words about the film and said that the term “human scum” had been used by the likes of “Hitler and Stalin and Kim Jong-un and Bolsonaro”.
Stan, who plays Trump in the film, said that he found the post “ridiculous” but that he also didn’t want to “dismiss it because he [Trump] selectively forgets his own life”.
When asked about the consequences of starring in a film like this, Strong admitted that: “It wasn't until yesterday that I got a sense that this feels slightly precarious and slightly dangerous and being in the crosshairs of this moment. I think art is meant to speak truth to power, we don't often do that with consequences. The spectre of consequences weighs heavily on me. Our writer [Gabe Sherman] yesterday was barraged with death threats and antisemitic hate. The film is an attempt to humanistically interrogate these people.”
The 45-year-old said that he believed the film was “responsible” adding that “I think we all aimed for veracity. We weren't trying to villify Trump, which I think many people presume was the only reason we were making this film.“
When asked about whether they had experienced any sympathy for Trump when making the film, Stan said: “I think it's important that we learn from the past as we have done with other controversial figures and that we understand where it comes from. It's more complicated than sympathy. Humanising someone is all about showing their warts and flaws and the traumas that have led them to be who they are and hopefully prevent it and not let history repeat itself as it constantly does.”
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days
New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days
New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled
The Apprentice, which opens in the UK on 18 October, has been dismissed as “pure fiction” by the former Potus, yet even his own ghost writer Tony Schwartz has said that the film gets “most things” right.
