Strange ‘Apprentice’ Bedfellows: Trump Biopic Director Boosts Roger Stone’s Praise Of Jeremy Strong’s “Uncanny” Roy Cohn Performance
If you thought that Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney singing from the same electoral choirbook last week was a political head-turner, wait to you see who The Apprentice director Ali Abbasi is linking up with.
Proving that political and artistic bedfellows can be unpredictable, Abbasi reposted some praise his film and one of its stars Jeremy Strong received Tuesday from Donald Trump acolyte and ex-Richard Nixon operative Roger Stone.
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“I knew Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn was a friend of mine,” Stone wrote on X. “The portrayal of Roy Cohn by actor Jeremy Strong in the new movie “The Apprentice ” is uncanny in it’s [sic] accuracy.”
The unlikely positive feedback from amateur film critic Stone comes just days before Friday’s opening of the controversial movie about the influences and forces behind the former and perhaps future president’s rise in 1970s New York City.
Cohn, the ruthless former chief counsel to Joe McCarthy, was well connected in GOP circles despite numerous run-ins with the law throughout his life. His “attack, attack,” “deny, deny” and always-claim-victory tactics clearly found a willing and absorbing protégé in the ambitious second son of real estate mogul Fred Trump. The movie depicts Trump having a falling-out with Cohn (played by Strong) at the end of his life in the mid-1980s as the closeted gay lawyer was dying of AIDS-related ailments.
In true Cohn fashion, the Trump campaign earlier this year threatened legal action against Abbasi’s The Apprentice after its Cannes Film Festival world premiere. Specifically, the campaign objected to a scene showing Sebastian Stan’s Trump sexually assaulting his then-wife Ivana (played by Maria Bakalova). Ivana had accused Trump of rape in a deposition, but later said that she didn’t “want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.” She said in 2015 that her allegations came at a time of “very high tension during my divorce from Donald.”
The Trump campaign’s Dhillon Law Group lawyers said in a May letter to the film’s producers that if they did “not immediately cease and desist all distribution and marketing of this libelous farce,” then they would “be forced to pursue all appropriate legal remedies.”
Still, despite being picked up by Briarcliff Entertainment for distribution, a screening at Telluride in late August and a planned TV ad campaign ahead of this week’s release, its been legal crickets from Team Trump over The Apprentice. The campaign did not respond to request for comment on Stone’s post today.
Today’s tweet by Stone isn’t the first time the sartorial political consultant has been mentioned by Abbasi, or in relation to The Apprentice.
In a Q&A in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, Abbasi told the audience he has heard no more legal threats since May’s cease-and-desist letter. He also noted that Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, had asked people to boycott the movie and go see the biopic Reagan instead. “He also said that he’s the ‘First Amendment’ guy,” Abbasi noted.
“It’s unpredictable. A friend of mine told me Roger Stone saw it and actually really liked it, so you never know,” Abbasi added to laughs from the audience.
He said, “Our job was not to judge Mr. Trump. It’s not to do any kind of advertisement for Republicans or Democrats. We didn’t have this, ‘We have to find dirt on him.’ Our job, I felt, was to try to depict him as a human being in a fair way. And that means the highlights of his character.”
Abbasi said that the sexual assault scene “is a really important turning point for a really important relationship in his life, which is with Ivana, which breaks down, and is sort of one of the last threads that connects him to his humanity. So I felt comfortable.” The movie also was vetted by the production’s lawyers, he said.
Another surprising thing about the making of the movie was that, according to Abbasi, they actually considered an actress, not an actor like Stan, to play Trump.
“I thought that maybe it should be an actress playing Trump. because I thought there was something awkward and off about his body language. And I wanted to have that I want to sort of play with that,” he said. “And we tried it, and it felt like it was a bit too much. I thought there was going to be a lot of prosthetics so you wouldn’t necessarily feel, ‘Oh, it’s a woman, playing a man.’ For example, Cate Blanchett did a great job doing Bob Dylan. So it’s possible.”
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