Film depicts Donald Trump and Roy Cohn in the '70s and '80s. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Stan and Strong’s astonishing performances also deepen and develop over the course of the film.

Even in an election year, most seem to agree on one aspect about Ali Abbasi’s much-debated Donald Trump film “The Apprentice”: Sebastian Stan is a remarkably good Trump and Jeremy Strong is chillingly riveting as the New York power broker Roy Cohn.

Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, and co-star Maria Bakalova speak to IndieWire at the NYC premiere of 'The Apprentice.'

“The Apprentice,” directed by the Iranian-Danish filmmaker Abbasi and scripted by Gabriel Sherman, puts the Cohn-Trump relationship at its center, and in doing so, gives Strong and Stan two of the best roles of their careers. Strong calls Cohn “probably the single most fascinating person I’ve ever studied and interrogated and attempted to inhabit.”

The Apprentice has been in the works since 2018, while Donald Trump was president, however, it wasn’t until last fall that the movie was filmed. Jeremy Strong (who is best known for his role in the Succession cast) plays American lawyer Roy Cohn alongside Stan's Trump in the movie, and he shared these thoughts about it with Entertainment Weekly:

Stan as a young Donald Trump and Strong as his mentor Roy Cohn are absolutely gripping in director Ali Abbasi's less-than-flattering cinematic portrait.

Is it just my imagination, or is “The Apprentice” a pretty interesting movie? Less than a month before a U.S. presidential election, you’d expect an 11th-hour Trump biopic (which premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival) to settle for cheap smears and a bunch of propaganda.