Trump biopic "The Apprentice" faces legal threats amid controversy
"A story of greed and betrayal"—that's how foreign journalists are describing the new film "The Apprentice." It tells the story of a young Donald Trump at the beck and call of a wealthy businessman. The creators are facing serious legal threats.
6:59 AM EDT, September 3, 2024
"Donald Trump has threatened again but hasn't followed through," write Deadline journalists after the premiere of "The Apprentice" at the Telluride Film Festival. Just a few months ago, Trump, who is running again in the presidential campaign, threatened to sue the creators if the film was ever shown. Something didn't go as planned for the politician.
"The Apprentice" - A film about Donald Trump's beginnings ignites emotions
In May of this year, Dhillon Law Group, Trump's lawyers, sent a warning letter to the creators. It stated that if the film ever sees the light of day, legal consequences would be pursued against, among others, the director.
"This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should not see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire," read the statement from the politician's lawyers, quoted by Variety.
The film was already shown at the Cannes Festival and now at Telluride. In October of this year, just before the elections, Americans will see it in theaters. — This is not a Trump movie. This is a movie about — speaking on my own behalf — the American political system. And a Frankenstein story of how Roy Cohn created Donald Trump in his own image. These guys really illustrate the system – film director Ali Abbasi now says in an interview with "Hollywood Reporter."
Sebastian Stan plays the young Trump, and his mentor, Roy Cohn, is played by "Succession" star Jeremy Strong. The controversy doesn't only come from the film’s subject matter, which portrays Trump as a king of American business, but also from certain scenes that have been buzzing online. In one part of the film, Trump is shown forcing his wife Ivana into sex.
– She made those allegations under oath in a divorce proceeding under the penalty of perjury. She then clarified her statement under pressure from Trump’s lawyers when a book was about to come out. And then in 2015, when he was running for president and she was the mother of his children who could go to the White House, she said, "Oh, this didn’t happen." So if you’re a writer and you’re striving for an emotionally true version of the story, what feels the most true to you? – explains Gabriel Sherman, the film's screenwriter.
In the same interview, Jeremy Strong emphasized: – I came to this not as a Democrat or a Republican, but as a humanist. And through a humanistic lens, your job always is to interrogate human experience and life. And the mirror thing [Abbasi said, during his introduction of Saturday’s screening, that he was trying to hold a mirror up to American society] makes me think of Hamlet. In Hamlet, he writes that our job is to hold a mirror up to nature and to show the age and body of the time — its form and pressure.
