Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice,” the tale of how a young Donald Trump fell into the orbit and under the spell of the venal lawyer Roy Cohn in the 1970s, struggled to get financing and a U.S. release after its premiere in Cannes last May. But it did unexpectedly well in Oscar nominations, with Sebastian Stan breaking into the Best Actor category for his performance as Trump and Jeremy Strong landing a Best Supporting Actor nomination for playing Cohn, a vicious fighter and closeted gay man who gave the would-be tycoon rules for survival that he still uses: always attack, admit nothing, deny everything and never admit defeat.
What led you to Roy Cohn?
Another filmmaker had approached me five or six years ago about playing Roy. There wasn’t a script, but I went and I watched some of the documentaries. Matt Tyrnauer’s (“Where’s My Roy Cohn?”) was a really brilliant documentary. And then I went down the rabbit hole because I’d never really encountered a human being like him, both monstrous and childlike at the same time. He is part ghoul, part Lost Boy, part kingmaker, part Iago.
What did it take to get you from being fascinated by him to agreeing to play him for Ali Abbasi?
Gabe Sherman had written a great script that was based on extensive research and journalistic veracity. And Ali was this sort of punk-rock Lynchian filmmaker, and I thought that the alchemy of these two would yield something interesting. Rilke said, “Surely all great art is a product of having been in danger.” I’m always looking for a plank to walk out on, and I couldn’t find a longer, bigger, more treacherous, precipitous plank to walk out on than trying to play Roy Cohn.
So then it becomes a matter of trying to immerse yourself in the character as much as you can?
Yeah. I’ve done historical characters before, in “The Big Short”and “Selma”and “(The Trial of the) Chicago 7.” And if I have a way of approaching it, it involves trying to do all the research, reading every book. Roy wrote a few books. Sidney Zion wrote a great book on Roy and there’s a tremendous amount of archival material. He was on a lot of talk shows, he was a total talk show whore. And so there’s a real plethora of Roy.
There’s a fantastic interview that he did with Gore Vidal that I watched until my eyes turned blue and fell outta my head. (Grins, points to his eyes.) That’s why they look like this. It’s just endlessly observing and studying and interrogating and becoming a kind of forensic detective on an emotional and spiritual level. And talking to people who knew him. Ken Auletta, who had interviewed him for Esquire in 1977, said that of all the people he’d encountered — and he wrote on (Harvey) Weinstein and others — that Roy was the most monstrous person he’d ever encountered.
He’s like a clusterf–k of a person, if I can say that. It was impossible to reconcile aspects of his character, and I think that’s correct. I think they were unreconciled in his life, and that’s what created so much pain. But really, the denial of his own nature and the level of self-deception, the denial of reality — that’s his legacy, I think. Self-denial was the dark heart of it for me.
Is it exhausting to immerse yourself in a guy like that?
You know what’s interesting? I remember talking to (Robert) Downey before I started. He had seen the Tyrnauer documentary, and he said, “He’s such a gleeful guy.”
He was exactly right. Roy was gleeful. So while others think he’s despicable and call him one of the worst humans of the 20th century — I don’t know that I agree with that, but he was up there — he was gleeful. He had a tremendous charismatic force, and that was one of the things that endeared people to him, I dare say, and one of the things that endear people to his successor. I thought about Roy sort of hanging over the Capitol rotunda (on Inauguration Day). And part of what he passed on, besides the dark arts of dissimilation and deception, was this denial.
There really is a sense that as we’re watching this movie, we are still surrounded by signs of what Roy Cohn wrought.
Oh, no question. I find it very harrowing to watch this film now, which I have done once since Trump was elected. But I would take what you said even further to say that Roy’s ideology of brute force and misinformation and aggression is encoded in nearly everything that the president does. It is the well water from which he draws — to me, the poisoned well water. Roy’s influence cannot be overstated. I think we’re living in his world now, and the film has a great deal to say about how we got here.
I didn’t go into the film feeling or wanting to feel any sympathy for Roy Cohn, and yet I came out feeling a little.
Thank you. I think as actors, we have to approach whatever we’re doing humanistically, to suspend our judgment and try and engage with empathy. This has been controversial, but I would say we should consider having empathy for those that we deem not worthy of empathy.
I’m not saying we should condone them. There’s a great William Saroyan quote where he says, “Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness and evil. These, understand.” And I think it’s the role of art and film to attempt to understand these people. We’re complicit if we’ve failed to attempt to understand on a human level why these people are the way they are and what infernal engines are driving them.
You don’t go into these things with a plan or an agenda: “Oh, I wanna make people feel sympathy for Roy Cohn.” I just allow it to come through me. My friend Joshua Oppenheimer, who made the incredible documentary ‘The Act of Killing,’ texted me and mentioned the end of that film. Joshua was on a rooftop with a man who was a death squad leader, who was coughing (and retching) as he stared into the abyss of his own wasted life, in Joshua’s words. And I think he felt that Roy Cohn was doing that in this film.
That was my experience — that for a moment, the veil of self-deception and denial was lifted and he was staring into a searing regret for the infinite emptiness of his own wasted life. That made me feel that his life was a tragedy, and I felt pity for him.
Ali Abbasi is not known for being understated and naturalistic, and Cohn and Trump were guys who operate on a theatrical level anyway.
Sure. I love that.
You don’t want to make them more of a caricature than they had made themselves. So how do you figure out how big you can go?
That’s such a great question. I think it has to be finely calibrated. I would say two things. Some of my favorite performances ever, that I’ve been most inspired by, contain an element of theatricality and are heightened. Laurence Olivier, in his autobiography, talks about this term that he called theatrical courage, which to me, if there are virtues that actors can have, the two that mean the most would be vulnerability and theatrical courage. And theatricality can mean size, but it also must be utterly grounded in truth.
And the other thing I would say, and this is something that Stella Adler said, she said that you can be as large as life. It’s not a matter of being big. It’s about being as large as life. No more, no less than what they are. I think you have to calibrate it to the subject. What I attempted to do was not interpret Roy. I attempted to inhabit Roy as I saw him, with a levelheaded gaze.
Roger Stone knew Roy well, and he told me he felt like he was in the room with Roy. It’s funny to say, because I never thought I would feel gratified by a compliment from that person, but that was gratifying because what you want to do is not embellish it. You want to hit the bullseye in terms of rendering them with accuracy and then allowing it to catch fire. To me, work is meaningless unless it catches fire. I don’t know how to explain that, but we all sort of know what that means.
A version of this story first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s Awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
