Believe it or not, it has only been four days since Donald Trump’s inauguration. Needless to say, a whole helluva lot of what Ani DiFranco might call unprecedented sh!t has transpired since then. Today, amidst yet another cannon-blast of utterly bonkers developments, Sebastian Stan received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Trump in The Apprentice.
As Michael Schulman pointed out this afternoon, Stan is the first actor to be nominated for playing a sitting president. That’s a fun fact, but one of the things that makes it fun is that the president in question moved mountains to block the release of the movie, which tells the story of Trump’s toxic, somewhat homoerotic mentorship by Hall of Fame Rat Bastard Roy Cohn.
For months, it looked like Trump might successfully bury the The Apprentice. But director Ali Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman refused to knuckle under. And while the film scuffled at the box office when it finally came out, today’s news seems likely to get a lot more eyeballs on Stan’s remarkable performance, as well as Jeremy Strong’s electrifying turn as Cohn (which was also nominated for an Oscar).
I’m particularly excited about all this because I’ve been a fan of Sherman’s writing for a long time. His reporting was the inspiration for 2020’s Bombshell, about the sexual assault allegations against former Fox News chief Roger Ailes. Sherman had been a thorn in Fox’s side for years at that point, showing an uncanny knack for getting damning quotes from Murdoch minions who wouldn’t even bother to bestow a “no comment” on most reporters.
At some point during Trump’s first term, Sherman came across a stray anecdote about the president’s bizarrely intimate relationship with Cohn. He spent years researching the rise and fall of the two men’s tortured friendship, and now we have a film that does what so few creative works do when it comes to Trump: reveal new layers of his notoriously gnarled psyche.
I was thrilled to have the opportunity to interview Sherman about The Apprentice last year. We spoke long before Trump won re-election, and the conversation feels even more relevant now. I hope it makes you want to watch the movie!
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