Border and Holy Spider director Ali Abbasi takes us to dirty ol’ ’70s New York City, exploring the relationship between legal hatchet man Roy Cohn and…sigh…future President of the United States Donald Trump.
How to watch The Apprentice in the UK
The Apprentice hits UK cinemas on October 18, 2024.
What is The Apprentice about?
Not to be confused with the reality TV series of the same name, but obviously alluding to it, The Apprentice looks at the early years of Trump’s business career. In particular his personal and professional relationship with ruthless legal eagle Roy Cohn—a veteran of the McCarthy witch hunts (he did the hunting) who is generally regarded as a key figure in Trump’s rise to political and economic power.
Kicking off in the ’70s and carrying us through to the ’80s, the film encompasses Trump’s legal stoushes over discriminatory housing practices. This first brought him into Cohn’s orbit, and his rise to prominence among New York’s elite, with Cohn guiding him from the shadows and first wife Ivana on his arm, along the way charting his transformation from ambitious outsider, to… well, whatever his is now.
The cast of The Apprentice
The Winter Soldier himself, Sebastian Stan, is Trump, while Succession‘s Jeremy Strong is Cohn, following in the footsteps of Al Pacino, who played the gimlet-eyed lawyer in Mike Nichols’ Angels in America. Maria Bakalova is Ivana Trump; Martin Donovan is Fred Trump, Donald’s father; Ben Sullivan is Russell Eldridge; Charlie Carrick is Fred Trump Jr., Donald’s brother; Mark Rendall is Daniel Sullivan; and Joe Pingue is mobster Anthony Salerno, another Cohn client.
The Apprentice trailer
Why we’re excited about The Apprentice
All else aside, it’ll be interesting to see smokin’ hot Sebastian Stan play the, uh, less than smokin’ DJT. Reviews have been broadly positive, although our own Rory Doherty, who caught the film at Cannes, notes that it “lacks instincts that make it feel distinct from the same, tired voices that have been decrying Trump for a decade”.
