Best Actor 2024: Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice

Sebastian Stan received his first Oscar nomination for portraying Donald Trump in The Apprentice. 

The Apprentice follows the rise of a young Donald Trump under the tutelage of crooked lawyer/power broker Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). 

I will say Stan getting this nomination at all is quite the achievement as he managed to go the distance of lawsuits to prevent the film from being released, dealing with his own fellow performance in A Different Man, and dealing with who I’m told is a fairly charged figure at the moment, I should note I live on Mars. But the biggest of all is the challenge of the performance itself. It is one thing to play a real person, it is another thing to play a real person that almost all viewers have a strong knowledge of how they look, behave, sound etc., it is even more so when that person has such an extreme personality and mannerisms that it is hard to see how one could possibly believably play such a part without falling into overt caricature, given caricature is the starting point. Thankfully Stan comes at that whole complication with a honestly kind of a masterful choice considering the challenge in front of him, which is approaching the creation of Trump as an objective within his performance. As the opening of the film, Stan’s amount of mannerisms that one would immediately identify as Trump are pretty light, vague would be probably the best description in that you might sense some minor accent, but nothing too thick, which keeps him from starting as that caricature. Instead Stan allows you into accepting Trump as a person as a character within the scheme of the film first, before we get to other things later. As we come in with Trump before he really is any public figure and instead is just a rich kid essentially trying to go to the restaurants to see if he can spot any actual power players. So there’s a pitfall already that Stan tiptoes around because there was potential to be too much of an innocent in the early scenes, something Stan avoids remarkably. Although corruption will be the arc, Stan’s performance isn’t from a good person to a bad person, he makes it a little more complicated than that. 

From the outset Stan’s performance rather purposefully portrays a man searching for something to be, as when you see him admiring the power players from afar it is with a keen interest in his eyes, and already some desire for whatever it is that they have. When Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) spots him and invites him over, Stan isn’t playing the naive innocent rather the sycophantic note looking for some kind of favor. What I think Stan does so well is his ability not to overplay a note, as to come in as the guy seeking this approval or way through others could’ve been an overdone note of just seeking so thinly, but Stan consistently brings more to the role than that. There is the putting on the front seeking to show his admiration for Cohn and his friends, but his asking for help with the cases he and his father are facing from Federal charges, there’s a genuine though not good quality in his asking of Roy to be his lawyer. Stan brings an innocence but the innocence doesn’t denote a goodness, rather just the lack of knowledge of how anything works in the world of political backdoor dealings, there is though the eagerness all the same in trying to find some way in. There is some reservation in Stan’s work, some moments where his eyes reflect someone not at all within the world at Cohn at this point when he doesn’t really want to drink or is even surprised by just how blunt Cohn is in terms of his more nefarious connections. Stan’s hesitation he plays though again is never of disgust precisely towards the immorality at least, but rather a more genuine surprise fitting for someone who really doesn’t know this way, yet in his way is making the choice to also begin taking this path himself. 

Cohn takes Trump under his wing which begins the journey of this film, and while some may balk at giving Trump any humanity to lose through the scheme of the film, I would say creating a dramatic arc tends to be more compelling that a character who starts fully evil, continues to be fully evil then stays evil. But what works about it anyways, is it is not that Trump is depicted as good, just he’s not on the level of Cohn at the start, which is a whole different thing. What Stan does so well is create a natural balance that does humanize Trump, but humanizes him in a way in which we do see a downfall in his morality, however it is a walk rather than a leap. In one of the earliest scenes between Cohn and Trump, Trump is trying to get Cohn specifically remove the federal charges that are built around denials for African Americans. The line that is key and Stan makes a meal out of is when he argues to Cohn that their company does allow African Americans into their housing with this mix of phoniness and misplaced earnestness as though he’s getting some kind of brownie points for it, before following up to explain that to get housing they have to prove they have far greater income than is the standard. Stan in the one line does several pivotal impacts, one is that his explanation isn’t a real defense of actual morality rather just a selling point, there’s no actual shame even if he’s shameless, however the actual presentation of the shamelessness and the sell is relatively subtle without someone who really knows how to sell a fairly faulty point at this avenue. Stan presents the man still learning with the leaning less of good or evil, but rather just the level of shame presented. The scene that soon follows, after Cohn  wins the case through blackmail, where Cohn coaches Trump’s phone interview, to go bigger, where Stan’s hesitating delivery to go bigger is just perfect, how he makes the awkward jumps to sell his Trump tower as bigger and better than any in the world, and the ups and downs in his rhythm are ideal in Stan’s performance. We start to hear a bit more of the Trump delivery in his voice and we start to see the basis from which he will expand in more ways than one. 

The most human elements we do see come in the scenes where we see Trump at home with his family and later also with his first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova). The former we get two important relationships, the one with his father Fred Sr. (Martin Donovan) and Trump’s older brother Fred Jr. In the former relationship we see Stan bring the same attempted approving manner in his delivery, something he gets from Cohn, but his father almost always consistently shuts down. With his brother Stan fashions the least calculated chemistry out of any in these scenes. We just see brothers between them and even a bit of warmth in a connection. You get a sense of their history with Stan just playing a certain sincerity more so than any other moment in his entire performance, as really does, at this moment, look up to and care about his brother, despite his brother being treated as a failure by their father. The other is with Ivana, which is where Stan is extremely successful in the way he plays within the image of Trump in the eyes of her. We both get a potential better man and a much worse man in tandem in these scenes. Stan in presenting his interest in her in the lower key moments of being attracted to her and admiring her, he’s very earnest and creates even a charming chemistry between himself and Bakalova early on. However at the same time even some of his methods, we see the Cohn rub off on him, as he goes about brandishing his wealth a bit more and when doing so Stan’s performance is outstanding in the way he weaponizes these tipping points towards something broader. It becomes the shades of a side to him at first, and in turn in these moments we get a bit more of the Trump breathing, the Trump delivery all becomes a little stronger, not too much but just enough. Stan is effortlessly convincing in this and more importantly you accept him as such as he builds up just a little bit more towards the expected version of Trump. 

The build up of the nature of Trump is so key here as we see him go about getting his Trump tower financed through rather duplicitous means including a massive state tax break that even Cohn is taken aback by the boldness and shamelessness. Stan’s delivery of the scene with the potential investors is so good where he says he has it all in his “pocket”, there’s a little build to convincing himself, something he won’t need later, but there’s growing confidence once he gets the words out. His posture gets a bit more swagger and Stan shows the way Trump begins to fully own the idea of making ridiculous promises that he just assumes he can keep, or maybe not even that. Stan is amazing throughout these scenes as he begins to show the wavering sides, there’s hints of the naive guy looking for the name for himself, but we also begin to see the man who firmly believes in his own hype. Stan starts to deliver daggers when the immoral bluntness begins to take hold that much more, such as when he begins to remark his wife as his business partner, with such callous disregard. Any of the love we might’ve seen, even hints of charm in that relationship are gone, and there is just a black hole there. Something that once again seems to become amplified when Trump’s most human connection is lost after his brother dies, and the scene afterwards where Ivana tries to comfort him is just outstanding work from Stan. Stan brings such genuine devastating emotion in the emotional distress, where you see the real sense of grief in there just nearly completely bursting out at every seam of the man, but as Ivana tries to comfort him, his attacks at her to “keep away from me” are as convincing in portraying the man trying to purge himself of any of that kind of weakness even if it is in this vile twisted way that rejects his very humanity. 

 

After that point Stan turns his performance just a bit more, the voice is even closer now, the mannerisms even more overt, everything getting closer to the known image of Trump, though with just the right convincing distance given he is playing a younger Trump, where Stan rather brilliantly matches up also in giving the outward facing version of the man in his TV interview scene. Stan starts showing a man who has fully accepted his hype without exception so he begins to basically brandish his own personality, and brandishes it by turning it up to a brazen shamelessness. When Trump states his goals or his intentions with everything, there is always the degree of the oversell now which Stan does so well in just now being rid of any hesitation. Now the selling constantly is just second nature and every bit of it is just who he is now. I particularly love the scene with his father, who is now suffering from dementia, where Stan has still a certain petulance to it, as the son of the disapproving father but now his manner towards him is mocking as the man with the power wanting to show his dad up instead of getting his  approval. His scenes with Bakalova are particularly disturbing because where Bakalova still plays towards someone trying to connect in affection with one another, Stan presents a man who dismisses her as just a waste of time for himself at this point. When he says he is no longer attracted to her, Stan is truly brutal, because there’s not a hint of the old affection but rather speaks like he’s talking about his old car that has gotten too rusty. He only shows any genuine, though not positive, emotion when she begins to make fun of him back, where Stan brings such a terrifying degree of ferocious pathetic insecurity as he goes about raping her as an act of pure hatred. 

After that we get to basically the final form of Trump where Stan’s masterful approach comes fully to fruition, where he has become just about the Trump caricature in terms of the mannerisms, the intonation of his voice, the effort of his breathing, the "stank face", the common places of impression are now there, but the way Stan went about it was to make us completely believe him. He does not become a cartoon version, rather we’ve seen him grow into this state bit by bit, so he becomes completely believable even when being the broadest version of Trump. The fascinating part is that Stan does this little by little so eloquently that you have just accepted him as such, but even more so he’s so successfully makes it completely go hand in hand with the arc of Trump fully embracing corruption. Where in Strong’s performance we saw the humanity of Cohn as he contracts AIDS and starts dying, Stan on the other hand purges any remaining feature of Trump’s humanity as such a striking contrast to Strong. Now when we see Stan in the boardroom, on tv or wherever, Stan absolutely owns every word, so confidently, so much without hesitation, not a hint of shame, in fact an overt shamelessness to everything he does. Stan shows that Trump is no longer playing the part he is the part and just now believes himself to be everything he claims he is. Even little moments that are comedic speak to this, such as arguing with his doctor over basic health facts, or announcing his enjoyment of cheese balls, Stan speaks as a man so sure of every idea he has in his head that there is no argument he can lose, at least in his own mind. That’s combined with the callousness now being something he doesn’t even need to try for. One moment that would seem mostly about Strong, where Cohn falls apart realizing that his friendship with Trump has been meaningless, Stan is as important, because watch him throughout the scene, there isn’t a hint of empathy or care, every reaction from Stan is just that he’s seeing a burden he has to deal with, not a friend he’s trying to celebrate one last time. Stan delivers a truly great performance that avoids every potential pitfall he could’ve fallen into. Honestly he performs something I thought nearly impossible, since it would be so easy to have just become a surface caricature. Stan makes you believe him as Trump, makes you believe this portrait of Trump, which doesn’t reject the mannerisms or voice, but rather finds a way to cultivate it slowly into an essential final facet on this striking portrait of corruption.