Back in 2018, Ali Abbasi’s first trip to the Telluride Film Festival hit a snag. The forty-three-year-old Iranian director was set to attend the North American premiere of his second feature film, Border, when President Donald Trump issued a travel ban. The executive order halted all visas from six countries in the Middle East, including Iran. Though Abbasi lives in Copenhagen, he was born in Tehran. So his Iranian passport prevented him from entering the United States. Miraculously, he was granted the very first exception.
After the U.S. government intervened, Abbasi made it to the premiere. “I had Congress writing letters on our behalf,” the director tells me over Zoom. But when he arrived, the focus quickly shifted from Border to a barrage of questions regarding how his experience would shape his next project. Producers and writers hounded him to make a movie about Donald Trump, volleying scripts at him left and right. “For a while, I thought, This is great PR,” Abbasi recalls. He couldn’t let the opportunity pass. Still, every story just felt like a “hit job."
Eventually, Abbasi read a script by Gabriel Sherman, a New York magazine contributing editor and a Roger Ailes biographer. Sherman’s idea of Donald Trump painted the former president as a product of the system that molded him. Roy Cohn, the prosecutor who pushed to send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair in 1953, served as his sculptor. For Abbasi, it was the perfect way to tell the story.
“There was this genuine thing about trying to understand him on a human level,” Abbasi explains. "Even when I read the script the first time, I was almost scared how sympathetic Donald was depicted. Because the person who is running for office now is a different person than we depict in the movie. They have overlaps, obviously. As a private citizen, we have big political disagreements. But the fact that I feel really feel bad for him unsettles me. That’s where it becomes exciting and worth making a movie about."
The film Abbasi and Sherman made together, The Apprentice, stars Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump. The story begins in 1973, when Trump is hungry for success in the real-estate business and eager for a mentor. Enter prosecutor Roy Cohn (played by Succession’s Jeremy Strong), who sees Trump as a protégé and potential plaything and teaches him how to abuse the system. Quickly, Donald learns to exaggerate his words, never admit defeat, and even dress just like his mentor. Succession-esque violins haunt the entire ordeal. Then the film takes a turn in the second half. Trump surpasses his master. The darkness seeps through the cracks. As Strong recently put it, the biopic is very much like Dr. Frankenstein losing control of his monster.
Despite what you might have seen in the news about the former president’s plan to sue the film, The Apprentice isn’t the brutal takedown of Donald Trump that you might expect. It’s also not not a takedown, either. Using Trump as the vehicle, The Apprentice attempts to thread the evolution of right-wing politics in America from the Red Scare in the 1950s all the way to Ronald Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again” campaign in 1980. Along the way, Trump rises to the top of his field. The film depicts his successes, failures, and crimes. If there’s one reason that Trump wants to stop people from seeing the film, it’s probably because The Apprentice depicts a scene in which he sexually assaults his first wife, Ivana.
After the Trump campaign complained, Abbasi offered to screen The Apprentice for the former president. As of Friday, October 11—the day that the film premieres in theaters—Trump has yet to take him up on the offer. In the meantime, the director shares with Esquire why he’s so fascinated with the American political machine, what draws him to such controversial figures, and whether he’s worried at all that the film might backfire right before the election.
ESQUIRE: I’m sure the first question on everyone’s mind is: Why make a movie about Donald Trump?
ALI ABBASI: To start, I don’t think I would do a movie about Donald Trump. That’s not how I see the movie. It’s about a sort of transformation. It’s about how he became the person he is through that specific relationship with Roy. And it’s really about the system in which they operate—the U.S. political system, the justice system—and how that affects how Roy teaches him to gain and manipulate power. Gabe Sherman, my co-writer, says that Trump is like the Forrest Gump of American politics. When you look at different eras, you see him popping up in photos. There’s a photo of Ronald Reagan meeting the king of Saudi Arabia, and who’s in the background? Donald Trump. Why?
Is that what interested you about American politics and this particular time in Trump’s life?
Part of my unhealthy obsession with American politics comes from my background as someone born and raised in Iran. We were basically an American colony until 1979. Overnight, that completely changed. Iran went from being America’s biggest friend in the Middle East to becoming the enemy. And if you grow up in that, you cannot help but have this unhealthy obsession with America. On top of all this, as a filmmaker, as an artist, there’s something interesting about the performative aspect of American politics. Nowhere else is it so transparent and so in your face in this extreme way. Watching American politics is almost like watching WWE.
This film is coming out before the election. Are you worried that The Apprentice might backfire by charming audiences with a younger, movie-star version of Donald Trump?
Honestly, what I’m more concerned with is that both sides find us really annoying—that we’re not anti-Trump enough for liberals and we’re not pro-Trump enough for MAGA people. When we showed the movie in Telluride, I was talking to so-called conservative viewers and so-called liberals. They were both confused. Does this guy love him or hate him? Is this a takedown, or is this not? And I thought, That’s the biggest compliment I’ve heard.
We’re sort of equal-opportunity offenders. For me, that’s the point. Can people watch the movie and give it a chance? That remains to be seen. But I really hope they do, because every single person that has watched the movie has told me the same thing: They’ve been surprised.
The relationship between Cohn and Trump in this story reminded me a lot of Frankenstein. Was that an allegory that was on your mind throughout the making of the film?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s a sort of Faustian deal—if you want to gain something, you must lose something. Then the protégé outwits the master. That definitely is a theme. That was one of the things that really caught my attention when I read Gabe’s original draft. I was like, This is almost too good to be true. You have this young guy who wants to rise and become someone, but he has money. He has power, in a way, but he doesn’t have the connection. He doesn’t know what to do with it. Then he meets the right person. And as he is rising, Roy gets weak. He loses his job and dies. And you can’t make that up. If we wrote that, it would be too cliché.
Was there something that stood out to you about Sebastian Stan’s performance that made him the clear pick to play Donald Trump?
Sebastian is a minimalist when it comes to performing. That is very important when dealing with someone where there’s just pitfall after pitfall. If you want to go to town with someone like Donald Trump as a character, you certainly end up probably going Saturday Night Live. You know? Sebastian has this uncanny ability where he can get in under the skin of these sleazy, douchebaggy, flawed human beings and make them more human, make ’em even likable. You feel with them, you feel bad for them.
I felt that way with Jeremy Strong’s performance as well. When he’s crying at his Mar-a-Lago birthday dinner, you don’t imagine walking into this film that you’ll eventually feel a little empathy for someone like Roy Cohn.
Jeremy came fairly late to the project, and I thank the film gods who made that possible, because he has a different instinct. He has a different way of working—and he’s a completely different person. Because of the way it was written, and the focus of the movie, the core energy of the movie is the chemistry between Sebastian and Jeremy. And if that didn’t work, this movie would’ve been shit. It doesn’t matter if it was historically accurate or not. This is really where you know that he is a great actor. You talked about the empathy you have for Roy Cohn at the end of the movie. It’s absolutely heartbreaking. It doesn’t matter what you think this guy did. It doesn’t matter that he was a vicious, very flawed human being. That Jeremy is able to get there, it was a very important moment. Because it’s only when you grasp the humanity of Roy that you understand how far Donald has come from his own humanity.
Regarding Holy Spider—your previous film about the serial killer Saeed Hanaei—is there something about depicting controversial figures that you are drawn to?
I’m naturally drawn to the other. We have this way of defining the boundary of our own community, or our own humanity, by defining us as a group and them as another group that is not us. The real cathartic experience is actually looking at myself from the eye of the other and trying to understand that, because that is the ultimate test of the empathy machine. If you try to understand the other side’s logic, it’s not necessarily because they are monsters or they’re bad, they’re evil. So this is a red thread throughout what I’ve been doing, and I enjoy it. But after this, I need to take a break from controversy. Maybe the next thing is going to be a rom-com. I don’t know, but I’ve had my share now.
When you were asked to direct the controversial ending to The Last of Us season 1, do you think it was because HBO knew you could handle the necessary nuance?
I remember [showrunner] Craig [Mazin] was like, “This episode is great for you. It’s rough and it’s freezing and they’re eating each other.” I was like, “What? Give me something nice and warm, with a lot of love.” But you’re right. I hate to be pigeonholed that way, but I’ve shown that I can do that—as hard as it was for me at times to work in that machine.
I’m so used to being autonomous, being a control freak to every goddamn detail, and now suddenly I’m part of a bigger machine where Craig and [The Last of Us creator] Neil [Druckmann] have made a lot of decisions before I even arrived. But they had integrity. Even when we fought—and to this day, there are some major disagreements that I don’t like about the cuts that ended up in the show—I still respect them, because I would rather be in a fight with Craig than talk to a committee of twelve people. And that was part of the success of the show—that it actually has a singular vision and is not trying to please everyone.
Do you think Donald Trump will ever take you up on your offer to watch The Apprentice together?
Honestly, here’s how I read it: If this movie was so bad, so partisan, so worthless, and as useless as Mr. Trump’s campaign manager and all these people say, then why is it they’re so afraid of it? Why is it that they want to boycott or sue? People are smart. Just let people watch it. They can decide if it’s a bad movie or if it’s good. I know that he’s a polarizing figure, but if I could ask one thing from people, it’s that they should watch the movie for themselves.
Right. Just see a movie before you have an opinion about it.
Exactly. But I do think that Mr. Trump will watch this. The person I have been studying, that I know relatively well, would watch this. He would not be able to not watch this. And it would be more fun for him—and me—if we watched it together.
