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| Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn in The Apprentice |
Nominated for multiple Best Actor awards, Sebastian Stan has spoken at length about his performance as the young Donald Trump in The Apprentice – but the other half of that film is Jeremy Strong’s performance as his mentor, Roy Cohn. Though he passed away in 1986, Cohn’s legacy left a defining mark on his protégé and, many argue, on the US itself.
“When I read about the dissolution of their relationship and how Roy felt betrayed that Donald distanced himself from Roy when Roy got sick with AIDS, I thought that there was enough for a, you know, Shakespearean arc of this mentor/protégé relationship,” said writer Gabriel Sherman at a press conference about the film last month. “That was the genesis of how I thought this one relationship would explain so much of how we got to it, where we are today.”
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| The Apprentice Photo: Apprentice Productions Ontario Inc/Profile Productions 2APS/Tailored Films Ltd 2023 |
Strong has himself been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe for his work but, at the same event, where he praised his co-stars, he downplayed his own contribution.
“I don't know that I go to any greater lengths than most actors,” he says modestly. “I came to this with a very basic understanding of Roy Cohn. I had seen Tony Kushner's Angels In America on stage, and I saw Mike Nichols’ film. Al Pacino’s performance is really towering and a daunting thing to step into an arena with. And I had seen Matt Tyrnauer's documentary, and I had also seen Ivy Meeropol's documentary, Bully. Coward. Victim.
“It felt like the highest degree of challenge to try and get inside the skin of this person who some people considered one of the worst human beings of the 20th Century, you know – who some people considered just this absolutely irredeemable, reprehensible abomination of humanity, and who was also, in his time, beloved by many. And who was undeniably a brilliant lawyer, in this time where we make movies about heroes and villains and we polarise everything. I'm very interested in not doing that and trying to approach these things and interrogate characters with a humanistic lens, and trying to understand the kind of toxic cocktail that forms someone like this, which creates a kind of destructive nihilism and also, I would say, a need for acceptance and love, which gets misfired in all kinds of terrible ways.
“My hope is to inhabit a character as fully and dimensionally as possible – in this case of someone where you sometimes feel like you're peering into the heart of darkness. It was creatively and morally, spiritually, just a really difficult and gratifying thing to do.
“There's a great deal of just transformation, you know? All the things you have to do as an actor to try and render these things with accuracy. That's part of the job. But there was obviously a great deal of that kind of work involved that's the art that hides the art.”
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| Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice |
The 2024 election result has only intensified his passion for this particular piece of work.
“To me, I think, the film becomes more essential than even before for people to see. I think diagnostically, it offers a great deal of insight into what happened and how we got to where we are today. You know, the past is prologue, and there's a lot to learn from the past. And famously, as Churchill said in, I think, 1948, those that fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.”
That was actually George Santayana in 1905, but he’s far from the first person to attribute it to Churchill.
“If you want to understand what happened, I think you can point a lot to Roy Cohn and to the influence that Roy Cohn had on Trump,” he continues. “To the sort of ideology based in denialism and nihilism that Cohn represented, and in a lot of ways originated in modern American politics. So yeah, I think that the film becomes increasingly relevant and tenfold more troubling to see.”
