‘The Apprentice’ Trailer: Roy Cohn Teaches Donald Trump His Rules to Win
Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice released its first trailer on Tuesday ahead of the much-discussed movie’s October release.
The film, from director Ali Abbasi and writer Gabriel Sherman, follows Sebastian Stan as a young Trump under the mentorship of Jeremy Strong’s Roy Cohn.
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In the trailer, Trump and Cohn are shown meeting, with Trump saying to his future mentor after he introduces himself, “The Roy Cohn? You’re brutal.”
“Guilty as charged,” Cohn replies.
Later, when Trump asks how Cohn “always wins,” Cohn shares his rules for victory.
“Attack, attack, attack; admit nothing, deny everything; no matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat,” Cohn says. He later adds, “You have to be willing to do anything to anyone to win.”
Cohn’s instructions play over a montage of Trump working on (and hyping up) new buildings and attending glitzy events with Maria Bakalova’s Ivana Trump. Trump is also shown helping himself to a “cheese ball” at a meeting, to Cohn’s disgust, and being criticized by both Cohn and Ivana, who tells him “your face looks like an orange.”
Trump is also shown looking at a Reagan “Make America Great Again” button and smiling.
After The Apprentice premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney wrote that the movie is “a reverse reflection of the mentorship process, in which the host becomes the hungry young upstart, laying the foundations for a business empire built in part out of smoke and mirrors, and operating under the guidance of a master manipulator.”
Several months later, the project was acquired by Tom Ortenberg’s Briarcliff Entertainment for a pre-election release on Oct. 11. The distribution news came on the heels of several months of tension between the movie and the Trump campaign, the latter of which issued legal threats against potential distributors.
“A young Donald Trump eager to make his name as a hungry second son of a wealthy family in 1970s New York, comes under the spell of Roy Cohn, the cutthroat attorney who would help create the Donald Trump we know today,” the film’s description reads. “Cohn sees in Trump the perfect protégé — someone with raw ambition, a hunger for success, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to win.”
The Apprentice will appear at some fall film festivals in the lead-up to Oct. 11 and be treated to a full awards campaign.
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