Vivian LankoBy OK McCausland.
After the first New York audience had seen the film, VF’s editor in chief, Radhika Jones, led a Q&A with those involved in the production, including actor Martin Donovan, who plays Trump’s father. Decades ago, as he revealed, he also briefly worked as a waiter at Trump Tower, although he never laid eyes on its namesake.
The audience was populated by both press and celebrities, including Laverne Cox, Anne Hathaway, Julian Schnabel, Sarah Paulson, Jeremy O. Harris, Bennett Miller, and the Bulgarian investigative journalist Christo Grozev, whose worked was highlighted in the Oscar-winning documentary Removed. Hathaway giggled after her close friend Strong compared working on The Apprentice to “Philippe Petit walking across the [World] Trade Center on the wire,” referring to “the level of risk involved and how badly you could just crash and burn,” which he noted were aspects of the project that “drew us towards it.”
Beyond Cohen, at least one more former Trump henchman was drawn in by the film as well. Shortly before the premiere, Roger Stone tweeted that Strong’s portrayal of his old friend Cohn “is uncanny in it’s accuracy.” (For what it’s worth, Stone did not comment on his own presence in the film, which includes a scene in which a Speedo-clad Stone refills Cohn’s cocktail as the older lawyer bakes in a tanning bed.) “No matter what your partisan background is, people are finding the humanity in these characters,” said Sherman from the stage.
As a Danish Iranian, Abassi has an outsider’s perspective of the American political system. “When you’re in the Middle East, it’s almost like you’re living downstream from this palace and the sewage goes through where you live,” the director explained during the Q&A. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an environmentally conscious king—the shit’s gonna go down there anyways…. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Democratic president or Republican president—we’re gonna get the short end of the stick anyway.”
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