Sebastian Stan is not making light of Donald Trump’s presidency after playing a young version of him in The Apprentice.
The audience at Cannes Film Festival started to laugh Tuesday when Stan, 43, shook his head at a question about his previous portrayal of Trump in the biopic — but the actor was quick to call out the crowd at the press conference.
“It’s just not a laughing matter, to be honest. It isn’t,” Stan chided. “I think we’re in a really, really bad place. I really do.”
He continued: “When you’re looking at what’s happening, which is the consolidation of the media, censorship, the threats, the supposed lawsuits that seemingly never end, but don’t actually go anywhere, you know, the writing was on the wall.”
Although he is now promoting his new movie Fjord two years after The Apprentice was released, Stan said that he is “still purging” after getting in the headspace required to play Trump for the film, which was directed by Ali Abbasi and came out months before the 2024 presidential election.
The movie centered around Trump’s relationship with attorney Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong, amid the president’s career as a real estate businessman in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s.
Before the film premiered at Cannes that year, Trump attempted to stop the film from coming out by sending a cease and desist letter to the biopic’s producers. His campaign at the time called the film “garbage” and “pure fiction,” and the president himself said it was “fake” and “classless.”
At this year’s Cannes, Stan went on to speak more about censorship and mentioned Trump’s recent tirades against late night TV show hosts, saying, “We encountered all that with the movie. To the point where we were, three days before the festival, unsure if the movie was going to play at the festival — and maybe more people are paying attention to the film, and I think we’ll stand the test of time for that — but we went through all of it way before Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. I wish it wasn’t like that.”
The I, Tonya actor was open about his stance against Trump throughout the release of the movie, which earned him and Strong both Oscar nominations for their performances.
He previously told the BBC that Trump should be “grateful” for the film, saying at the time: “We have pretty much handed him, I think, a very complex, three-dimensional take on his life, and I can’t recall anybody else doing that.”
