With less than a month until the presidential election, Jeremy Strong's new movie, The Apprentice, is causing a stir. The film centers on a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) as he’s trying to establish himself in his father’s business as a real estate developer. Strong plays Roy Cohn, Trump's attorney and mentor.
In May, Trump's attorneys sent a cease and desist letter, trying to block the film's U.S. release. The Apprentice opens Friday.
"No one would touch this movie. The studios were afraid to touch it. The streamers were afraid to touch it," Strong says. "They were afraid of litigation. And they were afraid of repercussions from a possible Trump administration."
In a statement to the Associated Press, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said that the Trump team will file a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”
Strong notes that the move to block the movie seems straight out of Cohn's playbook: "Deny, deflect, delay. ... If you do that vociferously and loudly enough, you will make it so."
In 1954, Cohn served as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy's Senate investigations into Communist influence in the U.S. government. Cohn and McCarthy also collaborated on an executive order banning gay people from serving in the federal government. Cohn died in 1986 shortly after being disbarred.
Strong is no stranger to difficult or unlikable characters. He won an Emmy for his portrayal of Kendall Roy in Succession, and he also played Lee Harvey Oswald in Parkland. He says he prepared for The Apprentice by reading Cohn's writings and by leaving his judgment behind.
"You have to really check that at the door as an actor," he says. "It's an empathic practice. ... I'm simply trying to inhabit him in a fully dimensional way."
Interview highlights
On the responsibility of playing a real person in The Apprentice
If there's any improvisation, the improvisation is drawn, usually in my case, from historical record. So, for example, Roy wrote a number of books … and there are sort of wonderful turns of phrase that Roy would use, things like “dead duck” or “phony as a $3 bill,” things that I put into the movie, ... just these little granular details that helped give dimension and weight, but also accuracy. … I absolutely feel a sort of fidelity to truth with a capital "T," which is funny in this case because Roy Cohn, if he's anything to me, he's like the progenitor of alternative facts. He's not someone who really espoused truth with a capital "T." He thought truth was a plaything that you could do as you wish with it.
On an improvised take of the last scene of the Succession, where he climbed the barrier to the river side, insinuating that Kendall attempts suicide
You, I think, learn over a lifetime to obey your deepest instincts. It's that thing of, better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission. I find that I generally don't believe in asking permission because, especially now, there's so many layers of risk averse, safety-oriented [production staff], and these things are all important, but I was obeying a deep impulse.
My feeling and strong conviction was and is — but it's Jesse [Armstrong]'s show at the end of the day — that this was an extinction-level event for Kendall and that there was no coming back from it. ... And at this point, he had lost everything. He had lost his father. He had lost his siblings. He had lost his ex-wife. He had lost his children. He'd lost his putative reason for being. And also, remember, he was an addict. So I just did not believe that he was coming back from that. … The moment I think that Jesse chose is extremely powerful and he's sort of frozen in a kind of inner scream. And I love that he chose that.
On Kendall’s infamous rap, "L to the OG," performed at a dinner celebrating his father’s 50th year in the company on Succession
Nick Britell, who's the composer, called me up … and he said, "Hey, I have this rap. Maybe you could do it at the dinner?” We were filming it three days later, and he played it for me on the phone and I have a recording of it in my voice notes, and it was roughly what it became. I made up the chorus for it and made up the melody for it and made it up in the car as we were driving from Glasgow to Dundee. And it's just a pretty ad-hoc thing in the making of it. You're just kind of throwing something together and you're dancing as fast as you can. And I asked the costume designer, I sketched out a jersey that I thought I could wear, and they made it for me and had it three days later. …
I didn't want anyone to hear it until the first take. So one thing I love about that scene is the look on Kieran [Culkin] and Sarah [Snook] and everybody's faces, which is just incredible … because they've never seen me do it until then.
On whether staying away from other actors on set helps him with his character
It's not always been a popular answer, but if I'm honest, I would say yes. … [It's about] taking a break from the social domain so that you can be in touch with yourself on a deeper level.
Kendall, as written, was someone who was going through a very deep level of existential agony and confronting crisis after crisis, including having the death of a person weighing on him. ... I don't take that lightly. And I feel that my job is to actually understand that and try and inhabit that so that when that character says, "I'm blown into a million pieces," on the dirt floor of the parking lot at the end of Season 4, that I can mean those words. So I have to do whatever I have to do to earn that and arrive at that place. And that often doesn't involve having a social bon ami with other actors. …
[But] you're not doing this alone. It might sound like I'm saying you're doing this alone, but I'm not saying that. ... When you're between "Action!" and "Cut!" it's something you do together. I personally think that whatever anyone wants to do outside of "Action!" and "Cut!" is their own business. And different people approach this work in different ways and need different things to serve it to their fullest.
On memorizing lines
I've been learning plays since I was a little kid and I did theater for my whole life until about 10 years ago, and then I started doing more film and television. But even on Succession, you're learning a 90- or 100-page script every 10 days. And I have to learn that upside down and left and right and if I was thrown out of a plane in the middle of a cyclone, I would still know it. That's how well I have to know a text so that I can internalize it the way I feel that I need to. It's a muscle. So maybe it's just through habit and repetition … but I have to work very hard at it. Some people have a photographic memory or can just learn things very easily. But I've never been someone for whom anything comes particularly easy.
On how his parents’ work influenced him
My father worked in juvenile justice and ran these essentially jails for the Department of Youth Services. My mother was a hospice nurse. They were both sort of givers. They're both empaths and I think really courageous people. …
I think they actually really shielded my brother and I from that and protected us from any of that heaviness or drama. ... That had a huge effect on me, that they did something that really mattered to them. ... I do think there was something about how central my parents' work was to their lives and how much they gave of themselves to it that imprinted itself on me.
On seeing acting as freedom from his own anxieties
I would also say that acting and the impulse to do this was initially an escape and wanting to escape from where I lived, from the heaviness that I felt, from the frayed, strained financial situation and struggles that my parents had. It's a bit of a Houdini act, because you can enter into an imaginary world and be free of all of that. Be free of your circumstances and be free of yourself, because self, as we all I think know, can be a kind of prison. So acting is a liberative process, because you can just immediately be free from the prison of self and from your environment and circumstances.
On leaving his characters — even Kendall Roy — behind
I have a stack of scripts in my office and it's like this stack of lives that I've had that when they're over, they're over, and you just put them away and I put it away because I have a life and children. ... So I don't feel more of a kinship with that role than I do with any other role that I've ever played, which might sound like a strange thing, because I know it's the thing that I've become known most for … [and it was] a seven-year thing. One day maybe I'll watch it all back and take in the magnitude of what it was. But I've probably had to protect myself from that because I don't think that that would serve me, if that makes any sense. … I find that you do your work, you do it on the day, you give it everything, and then that's it. Like, that's all you need to be involved with. So whether it becomes the biggest thing in the world, whether they release a single, whether something wins the Academy Award, that's not your concern. Your concern is to be all in when you're doing it.
Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Copyright 2024 NPR
