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If you thought that Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney singing from the same electoral choirbook last week was a political head-turner, wait to you see who The Apprentice director Ali Abbasi is linking up with.
Proving that political and artistic bedfellows can be very unpredictable, Abbasi reposted some praise the film and one of its stars Jeremy Strong received today from Donald Trump acolyte and ex-Richard Nixon operative Roger Stone:
The unlikely positive feedback from amateur film critic Stone comes just days before the controversial movie on the influences and forces behind the former and perhaps future president’s rise in 1970s NYC opens nationwide on October 11.
Ex-Joe McCarthy chief counsel, the ruthless Cohn was very well connected in GOP circles despite numerous run-ins with the law over his life. His “attack, attack,” “deny, deny” and always claim victory tactics clearly found a wiling and absorbing protégé in the ambitious second son of real estate mogul Fred Trump. That the former Apprentice TV show host dumped Cohn at the end of his life in the mid-1980s as the closeted gay lawyer was dying of AIDS-related ailments is terribly unsurprising.
In true Cohn fashion, the Trump campaign earlier this year threatened legal action against Abbasi’s Strong and Sebastian Stan starring film after its Cannes Film Festival debut. Specifically, the campaign objected to a scene showing Stan’s Trump sexually assaulting his then wife Ivana.
The Trump campaign’s Dhillon Law Group lawyers said in a May letter to the film’s producers that if they did “not immediately cease and desist all distribution and marketing of this libelous farce,” then they would “be forced to pursue all appropriate legal remedies.”
Still, despite being picked up by Briarcliff Entertainment for distribution, a screening at Telluride in late August and a planned TV ad campaign ahead of this week’s release, its been legal crickets from Team Trump over The Apprentice. The campaign did not respond to request for comment on Stone’s post today from Deadline. If the Trump campaign does get back to us, we will update this post.
Actually, today’s tweet by Stone isn’t the first time the sartorial political consultant has been mentioned by Abbasi or in relation to The Apprentice.
In a Q&A in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, Abbasi told the audience that he has heard no more legal threats since the May cease and desist letter. He also noted that Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, had asked people to boycott the movie and go see the movie Reagan instead, “He also said that he’s the ‘First Amendment’ guy,” Abassi noted.
“It’s unpredictable. A friend of mine told me Roger Stone saw it and actually really liked it, so you never know,” Abbasi added, to laughs from the audience.
Another surprising thing about the making of the movie was that, according to Abassi, they actually considered an actress, not an actor like Stan, to play Trump.
“I thought that maybe it should be an actress playing Trump. because I thought there was something awkward and off about his body language. And I wanted to have that I want to sort of play with that. And we tried it, and it felt like it was a bit too much. I thought there was going to be a lot of prosthetics so you wouldn’t necessarily feel, ‘Oh, it’s a woman, playing a man.’ For example, Cate Blanchett did a great job doing Bob Dylan. So it’s possible.”
