Sebastian Stan, who played a young, impotent Donald Trump in The Apprentice, is still sounding the alarm about the now-president.
In remarks at a Cannes Film Festival press conference to promote his new movie, Fjord, Stan, 43, was asked for his thoughts on the first year of the president’s second term, which prompted nervous laughter from reporters. Stan declared that Trump-led America is in “a really, really bad place,” and he doesn’t find it funny.
“It’s just not a laughing matter, to be honest,” Stan said after a pause, silencing the room. “It isn’t.”
“I think we’re in a really, really bad place. I really do,” he continued, “And to be honest with you, when you’re looking at what’s happening—if we’re talking about the consolidation of the media, censorship, threats, the supposed lawsuits that seemingly never end but don’t actually go anywhere. You know, the writing was on the wall.“
“We encountered all that with the movie,” he added.
Stan played Trump, 79, in 2024’s The Apprentice, which charted the celebrity businessman’s rise to real-estate prominence. The Daily Beast’s Nick Schager described it as a “bona fide supervillain origin story.”
Trump called the film, which was released less than a month before Election Day, “garbage” and “pure fiction,” and heavily threatened it with lawsuits (which never materialized).
“It’s a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country,” Trump said on Truth Social.
Stan recalled that Trump’s rebuke was so aggressive that he was “unsure if the movie was going to play the festival” up to three days before it premiered at Cannes in 2024.
“Maybe people are paying attention more to that film” now that Trump is back in office,“ he continued at Cannes. ”I think it will stand the test of time for that. But we went through all of it, right before Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert and so on. So, I wish it wasn’t like that.”
Despite Trump’s vehement disapproval of the film, Stan said in a 2025 Vanity Fair cover story that he would “put money down he’s seen it 100 f---ing times, of course, because he’s a narcissist.”
“And I bet you there’s certain things he likes about it,” the actor added.
In the film, which takes place largely in the 70s and 80s, Stan charts a young Trump’s rise through the New York real estate market and his budding relationship with his ruthless lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn, played by Succession‘s Jeremy Strong.
“He loses his humanity,” Stan told the outlet about Trump’s arc in the film. “I guess that’s essentially what happens. As an actor, all you’re trying to do is just look at these very human things and identify with them.”
The Ali Abbasi-directed film drew controversy for some of its most shocking scenes, including scenes depicting Trump brutally sexually assaulting his first wife, Ivana, based on her account in her 1993 book The Lost Tycoon, Trump standing awkwardly at a gay orgy, and Trump’s erectile dysfunction.
Strong and Stan were each nominated at the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes, and the BAFTAs.
