Many actors have played Donald Trump on screen over the years, from Alec Baldwin to Brendan Gleeson. Sebastian Stan wanted his turn to be different.
When Stan was tapped for the lead role in The student, a film that follows the then real estate magnate’s friendship with the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn, he did his own research. He read countless interviews and watched as much footage of Trump from the ’70s and ’80s as he could, listening to him “non-stop” and “bringing that into his work.” [his] bloodstream.”
Stan told Yahoo Entertainment that delving into Trump’s early life revealed a side of him that many might not expect to see, as we are “inundated” with media coverage of the former president, who candidate for re-election.
“When I look back at some of those earlier interviews with him, when he was very young and trying to get tax cuts, [build] the Grand Hyatt, there was something…pure and honest, and there was great potential that I saw in that person at the time,” he said. “I was fascinated to see what happened to this man.”
Stan said Trump became “bolder” under Cohn’s leadership.
“The loss of empathy and humanity, I think, was really tragic,” he added.
The student was written by Gabriel Sherman, a reporter who extensively covered Trump’s life before his presidency. Stan’s impression evolves as Trump ages, taking on the voice, mannerisms, appearance and speech patterns the former president is now known for.
“As the success continued to grow, so did the personality and brand he was building,” Stan said. “I think all of this stuff is ultimately nonsense, and I would actually argue that it’s more conscious than unconscious on his part.”
The changes are subtle scene by scene at first – until the end of the film, when Trump repeats Cohn’s three “win rules,” sounding more like his former mentor than the Trump seen at the beginning of the film.
Stan said he worked with director Ali Abbasi to follow Trump’s evolution in a way that was “palatable to an audience that already came to the theater with a lot of impressions and projections.”
Abbasi, an Iranian-Danish filmmaker, didn’t know much about Trump until he went viral for slowly descending an escalator in front of a crowd before announcing he was running for president in 2015.
Abbasi told Yahoo Entertainment that bringing an outsider’s perspective to a story about the Republican presidential candidate was both a strength and a weakness.
“It’s probably not a good thing to fetishize some of these things too much, you know?” said Abbasi. “I think we approach this era and these characters with a lack of reverence or respect, which is what gave the film its edge or rawness.”
He may not have noticed the significance of certain clubs Trump attended, but he wanted to look at the story “more like an anthropologist” who looks at characters “in a larger context” rather than judging things as high or lowbrow.
Stan said he felt like the opportunity to play Trump was “something I ultimately couldn’t ignore,” although he was initially nervous about it. He was attracted to working with Abbasi as “captain of the ship” because he offers a unique point of view as someone living abroad.
“Sometimes we have to look at the people who look down on us… to give us insight into what’s happening in the trenches,” Stan said.
Trump’s lawyers filed a defamation letter against the film after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, calling it a “malicious libel” that “should not see the light of day.” Following the film’s theatrical release on October 11, Trump condemned the film in a Truth Social post as a “cheap, defamatory and politically disgusting hatchet job plotted just before the 2024 presidential election.” In response, Abbasi wrote in an X-post that he was “available to discuss further.”
Abbasi told Yahoo Entertainment that he didn’t think the film would be that controversial — in his eyes, it’s “raw but balanced.”
“[Screenwriter Sherman] has really done a wonderful job of fact-checking and rigorous journalistic work,” he said. “When we were working on the script together, there was never a moment where I thought, ‘This is… a dirty secret that no one knew!’ It was well researched and the sources were public. There’s nothing here you can’t find with one Google search.
“I wasn’t naive about it [Trump] “I am a divisive figure, but I was perhaps a little naive about how the rest of the world would embrace that and how the corporate structure in Hollywood would want to take advantage of this opportunity,” he said.
After Trump’s legal threat, the film struggled to find a distributor. Its first week in theaters only grossed $1.6 million at the box office, but Abbasi wasn’t bothered.
“More people watched #TheApprentice in one weekend than a whole week of Trump rallies!” Abbasi posted on X.
The student is in theaters now.
