Trump Movie ‘The Apprentice’ Shocks Cannes, Receives Nearly Eight-Minute Standing Ovation

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Donald Trump Movie ‘The Apprentice’ Shocks Cannes, Receives Nearly Eight-Minute Standing Ovation

Patrick Brzeski and Scott Roxborough

Mon, May 20, 2024 at 1:53 PM CDT·4 min read

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One of the most anticipated moments of the 77th Cannes Film Festival finally arrived Monday night with the world premiere of the Donald Trump drama The Apprentice, starring Sebastian Stan as a young version of the real estate mogul in his pre-MAGA days.

Only Francis Ford Coppola’s wildly ambitious swan song Megalopolis had inspired more pre-premiere chatter and curiosity at this year’s edition of the glamorous French film festival. Ahead of its unveiling, virtually no one had seen The Apprentice, as the movie reportedly was finished only days before its premiere.

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Ali Abbasi, Stan, Martin Donovan and Maria Bakalova walked the Cannes red carpet for the premiere. Only Jeremy Strong, who plays notorious political fixer Roy Cohn in the film, was not in attendance.

Directed by acclaimed Iranian-Danish filmmaker Abbasi and written by Gabe Sherman, The Apprentice explores Donald Trump’s rise to power in 1980s America under the influence of the firebrand rightwing attorney Roy Cohn. Succession star Strong co-stars as Cohn, along with Martin Donovan (Tenet) as Fred Trump Sr. and Oscar and Golden Globe nominee Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) as Ivana Trump.

Several shocking moments late in the film — a scene depicting Trump’s alleged rape of his first wife Ivana and a surgery room sequence showing Trump getting liposuction — drew audible gasps from the Cannes premiere crowd. As the final credits rolled, the Cannes crowd starting clapping in time to the sound of Baccara’s “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” playing on the soundtrack.

After the screening, Abbasi warmly hugged his cast members and Cate Blanchett, sitting just in front of the director and crew, was the first to jump up and applaud, embracing Bakalova. The loudest applause was for Stan for his transformative performance as Trump. The crowd enthusiastically cheered and clapped, staying on their feet for nearly eight minutes, though many were spotted ducking out of the theater by the four-minute mark. Abbasi kept the crowd going, applauding and pointing randomly to people in the audience. Abbasi also held up his cell phone to the cameras during the standing ovation to show a shirtless selfie of Strong in costume and seemingly backstage from his play in New York. The moment drew big cheers and Abbasi kissed the screen of his phone.

When addressing the crowd, Abbasi commented on the current world events such as the war in Ukraine and the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, explaining how “in the time of turmoil there’s this tendency to look inwards” and “to bury your head deep in the sand and look inside and hope for the best.”

“The storm is not going to get away. The storm is coming. Actually, the worst times are to come,” he added. “But you can pretend it’s not here. You can also deal with it.”

Abbasi then addressed being questioned why he wanted to make a movie centered on Trump and argued that films need to be “relevant” again. He explained, “There is no nice metaphorical way to deal with the rising wave of fascism. There’s only the messy way. There’s only the the banal way. There’s only the way of dealing with this wave on its own terms, at its own level and it’s not going to be pretty, but I think the problem with the world is that the good people have been quiet for too long. So, I think it’s time to make movies relevant. It’s time to make movies political again.”

By Monday night, The Apprentice still didn’t have a U.S. distributor in place, although it sold earlier in the Cannes festival to StudioCanal for the U.K. and Ireland, where it will be released theatrically later this year.

Rocket Science is handling international sales on the project, which was financed by Kinematics, Head Gear Films, Screen Ireland, Film i Vast, the Danish Film Institute and National Bank of Canada.

The movie is produced by Daniel Bekerman for Scythia Films, Jacob Jarek for Profile Pictures, Ruth Treacy and Julianne Forde for Tailored Films and Abbasi and Louis Tisné for Film Institute. Executive producers are Amy Baer, Mark H. Rapaport, Emanuel Nunez, Josh Marks, Grant S. Johnson, Phil Hunt and Compton Ross, Thorsten Schumacher, Niamh Fagan, Sherman, Lee Broda, James Shani, Andrew Frank and Greg Denny.

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Trump Campaign Vows To Sue ‘The Apprentice’ Filmmakers Over Scene Of Ivana Trump Rape By Then-Real Estate Mogul

Dominic Patten

Mon, May 20, 2024 at 6:50 PM CDT·3 min read

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Already fighting dozens of indictments and an ongoing hush-money trial in New York, Donald Trump wants to head back to court over the movie that took Cannes by storm today.

“We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,”  the Trump campaign’s Steven Cheung declared Monday over the The Apprentice film by director Ali Abbasi. Depicting the rise of Trump (Sebastian Stan) out of his father’s shadow thanks to the well-connected and ruthless Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the film just debuted in the South of France to an 11-minute standing ovation.

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“This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” spokesperson Cheung said of the Competition film. “As with the illegal Biden Trials, this is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked.”

Among the many incidents from Trump’s early years in the 1970s and 1980s to his The Art of the Deal fame, there is a scene in the film of the past and potentially future president raping his then-wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova). The first former Mrs. Trump, who died in 2022, had spoken of the sexual assault in the years following the couple’s divorce but later recanted the incident in the decades before her death.

 

Ivana Trump in 2018

The Apprentice also has a rather graphic view on Stan’s Trump getting hair treatment for his emerging bald spot and liposuction for his emerging girth. As long has been rumored in Trumpland over the decades, there is also some pill popping — in this case amphetamines.

Deadline’s Pete Hammond called The Apprentice “compelling” in his review today, but Trump 2024 seems only compelled to want to beat the picture into the ground.

“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,” Cheung stated. “It belongs in a dumpster fire.”

Of course, The Apprentice is far from the first depiction of Trump, his family, acolytes and their alleged underhanded ways to appear on either the large or small screen. It also is worth noting that Trump and his minions threaten to sue critics or detractors all the time — a move straight out of the Roy Cohn playbook. Even when the former Celebrity Apprentice host does sue, he just as often quietly retracts the action or lets it die down the line.

RELATED: ‘Where’s My Roy Cohn?’ Review: Documentary On Ruthless NY Lawyer Shows His Chilling Influence From Beyond The Grave

In that context, it was seen as a near-certainty that Trump would lash out against The Apprentice with legal wrath — whether he files something, well, that’s another matter altogether.

What we do know is, with the prosecution having rested its case in the hush-money trial earlier Monday and a defense witness testifying, Donald Trump will be back in Judge Juan Merchan’s Manhattan courtroom Tuesday. Whether he crosses the line on the looming gag order or not — again — is TBD.

Lacking a distributor for now in this election year, The Apprentice is being sold at Cannes by CAA, WME and Rocket Science.