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Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind this awards season’s buzziest movies continues with The Apprentice, the Ali Abbasi-directed drama about the formative years of Donald Trump based on the feature-screenwriting debut of journalist Gabriel Sherman.
Sebastian Stan plays Trump beginning in the 1970s when he was a young New York real estate developer, while Jeremy Strong plays his mentor, the lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn, who teaches his protégé how to obtain power and wealth using deception, intimidation and media manipulation. Their relationship provides the anchor for the film, an origin story of sorts (“inspired by true events,” per the script’s title page) as Trump begins his rise. Maria Bakalova plays Trump’s first wife Ivana.
The film, Abbasi’s English-language debut, had a splashy world premiere at May’s Cannes Film Festival — a splash noted by Team Trump, which wanted to stop the film from being seen and threatened lawsuits. Eventually, Briarcliff Entertainment came aboard to distribute it in the U.S., and by the time the film screened at Telluride in late August the legal threats had quieted, and the pic hit theaters October 11, less than a month before Trump would win the presidency for a second time.
Sherman, who had written the biography The Loudest Voice in the Room that centered on the power of then-Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, had interviewed Trump many times as a young real estate reporter for the New York Observer, then followed him closely as reporter covering the 2016 election for New York Magazine and Vanity Fair.
Eventually the idea came to him that Trump’s rise was linked directly to his mentor, Cohn, who “taught his young acolyte how to speak and how to use all his lessons in the dark art of getting power,” Sherman says. Writing began in 2017, a year into Trump’s first term. Both Strong and executive producer Amy Baer have referenced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — the mad scientist who creates a monster — in how they thought of the script, which at times is a sympathetic portrayal of the ambitious Trump.
“People think of Trump as this outrage machine, this hateful, divisive figure, but in my eyes he’s an actor playing a role —and it is a role he has been playing so long that it has become his identity,” Sherman has said. “But when he was in his 20s and just starting out, he was a much less fully formed [person]. He was admittedly already exhibiting his unbridled ambition. But if you watch his early interviews, he’s soft-spoken, kind of hesitant. There’s a charm to him. He’s a little insecure, the opposite of the man we know today. That was one of the more exciting parts of the project, exploring this side of this person that no one has ever really seen.”
Read Sherman’s script below.
