No one asked for a Donald Trump biopic in these Donald Trump oversaturated times, but director Ali Abbasi made it anyway. The Apprentice premieres in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, the same year its real-life sore loser faces legal battles on a multitude of fronts, comes face-to-face with the specter of yet another bankruptcy, and vies for the presidency after maybe allegedly inciting insurrection. Talk about an SEO strategy. Sebastian Stan plays pre-Twitter-fingers Trump in the 1970s, right before the man was anybody but a snooty rich kid from Queens. Jeremy Strong plays the guy that made him somebody: Roy Cohn, the unscrupulous political fixer and slimy robber baron known for his prominent role in the McCarthy investigations. “The Apprentice is a dive into the underbelly of the American empire,” reads the official logline. “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.”
First-look images arrived on April 11, allowing us to scrutinize if Abbasi made Trump’s hands tiny enough or his signature toupee too nice-looking. Upon inspection of an image of Strong and Stan sitting in the back seat of a car in the middle of an intense discussion, I can say that Strong’s Cohn is far more orange than Stan’s Trump, perhaps foreshadowing Trump’s spray-tan addiction — that is, if the head makeup artist on the film did their job correctly. The Apprentice stole his master’s beauty routine, as seen in his recent mug shot.