- Title: Trump biopic 'The Apprentice' by Iranian director premieres at Cannes
- Date: 20th May 2024
- Summary: CANNES, FRANCE (MAY 20, 2024) (REUTERS) ***WARNING: CONTAINS FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY*** DONALD TRUMP FIGURINE ON TOP OF CAMERA FILM TEAM FOR “THE APPRENTICE” WALKING ON TO RED CARPET (LEFT TO RIGHT) ACTRESS MARIA BAKALOVA, DIRECTOR ALI ABBASI, ACTOR SEBASTIAN STAN, ACTOR MARTIN DONOVAN, PRODUCER DANIEL BEKERMAN AND PRODUCER JACOB JAREK WALKING ON TO RED CARPET PHOTOGRAPHERS TAKI
- Embargoed: 3rd June 2024 18:39
- Keywords: Cannes Film Festival Sebastian Stan The Apprentice premiere red carpet
- Location: CANNES, FRANCE
- City: CANNES, FRANCE
- Country: France
- Topics: Arts/Culture/Entertainment,Europe,Film
- Reuters ID: LVA001390819052024RP1
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text:"The Apprentice," Iran-born director Ali Abbasi's much-anticipated biographical drama detailing a young Donald Trump's ascendancy as a New York real estate mogul in the 1970s and '80s, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday (May 20) evening.
Part of the pull of the film, which shares the same name as the reality show that is its timing, as Trump, 77, looks to win another term as U.S. president when Americans vote in November.
The film shares its title with the reality show that helped make Trump and his catchphrase, You're fired!, a household name.
Sebastian Stan, who made his name in the Captain America trilogy at the Winter Soldier, morphs into the former president of the United States from his early stages as an upstart working for his father's business to a brazen, self-centred tycoon.
The story focuses on Trump's time under the tutelage of Roy Cohn, a political fixer best known for his involvement in Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist scare campaigns of the 1950s and portrayed by "Succession's" Jeremy Strong.
His three rules for success, which Trump later takes credit for while speaking with the writer of his business advice book "The Art of the Deal," are prescient of his traits in office: deny everything, always be on the attack and never admit defeat.
The pupil eventually overtakes the mentor, as Trump's increasing cruelty towards Cohn and his wife, Ivana, played by Maria Bakalova, matches the decline in his youthful looks.
Abbasi is known for his eclectic film repertoire, including 2022's Cannes entry "Holy Spider" about the killings of sex workers in Iran and "Border," a fantasy love story in Sweden.
Critics were mixed, praising for Stan and Strong while seeing the film's basis in actual events as a limitation.
"Sebastian Stan Plays Donald Trump in a Docudrama That Nails Everything About Him but His Mystery," read the headline for entertainment website Variety, while trade publication IndieWire pointed out that the film "can't get around the fact that Trump is too base and pathological to be of much dramatic interest."
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