Sebastian Stan on Being Advised Not to Play Donald Trump & Why He Did It (Exclusive)

Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong are dishing on “The Apprentice,” their new Donald Trump biographical drama set in the 1970s, as he seeks independence from his father’s influence and enters Manhattan real estate.

“Extra’s” Terri Seymour spoke with Sebastian and Jeremy about the film, which has them playing Donald Trump and notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, respectively.

Stan revealed that he’d be in the makeup chair for “about an hour and a half to two hours” to transform into Trump every morning.

He added, “We were shooting in a scattered way, jumping between time periods and so there was a lot of hair and makeup switches… Look, it was always a very anxious process. I mean, we didn’t come at it very easily. We had people that had been involved that we lost because the movie would start and stop and then it was really kind of this deliberate process of trying to find the right amount of not too much, not too little, just in between, and again, you do this and you never know if it’s always going to translate, if it’s going to get there in a way that you hope, but you stay committed and you hopefully get to the end.”

The movie features some controversial scenes, but did Sebastian feel uncomfortable taking on the role of Trump despite all the strong opinions?

He said, “I think I dealt with uncomfortable in 2019 when I first read the script and sort of left it at the door there. You have to leave judgment aside and go in there as open as possible and objective as possible to what the job calls for.”

Stan was even advised by people to not play Trump. He emphasized, “Again, people have very strong opinions about this man and this situation. There were people that obviously felt that half the country would be alienated or you know, there’s safety issues or whatever but again in America, to think that we would ever get to a state of fear where we’re not able to have a conversation in some capacity that inspires understanding where we may learn as we have the entitlement to learn from our authority figures, from the people that we elect to lead up, then I think that’s tragic.”

Jeremy chimed in, “We’ve made films about Nixon, we’ve made films about George W. Bush, we’ve made films about, you know, every imaginable historical figure. Why should we not be able to make a film about Donald Trump?”

Sebastian also explained how they managed to portray Trump and Cohn without it seeming like an impersonation. He said, “You kind of have to cross out the names and go look at it sort of with a fresh pair of eyes and try to understand. You’re an investigator, you’re a detective, you’re going in there, there’s a case before you, you’re looking at all of the evidence… Fortunately, there’s a lot of information out there and documents, books written, you try to get it all under the time you have, then you make some decisions.”

Jeremy shared his two cents, saying, “You want to try and create something as alive and dimensional as possible. I don’t really know how you do it, but that’s certainly what we were both attempting to do.”

The movie is coming out a month before the presidential election, which Jeremy calls “fortuitous” timing!

He elaborated, “The movie’s been around for years and years and it just happened to finally kind of come together last year. Then, the release was essentially delayed because nobody in Hollywood would touch this movie. They were afraid of litigation and repercussions and threats from Trump. We were able to get a distributor and so the movie’s coming out. It’s not entirely unintentional that it’s coming out in the middle of this historic election.”

Strong felt that it was an “essential story to be told” about the early beginnings of Trump and “how he became who he is now.”

It is unknown if Trump has seen the movie, but Jeremy hopes he will see it!