“It shouldn't be controversial”: Inside the hard-fought New York premiere of The Apprentice

Vivian LankaBy OK McCausland.

After the first New York audience saw the film, VFeditor-in-chief, Radhika Jones, conducted a question-and-answer session with those involved in the production, including the actor Martin Donovan, who plays Trump's father. As he revealed, he also briefly worked as a waiter in Trump Tower decades ago, but he never saw its namesake.

The audience consisted of both the press and celebrities Laverne Cox And Anne Hathaway. The latter giggled after her close friend compared Strong to work The apprentice To “Philippe Petit “walking a tightrope across the (World) Trade Center,” referring to “the magnitude of the risk involved and how badly you could just crash and burn,” which, he noted, were aspects of the project that “we were drawn to it.”

In addition to Cohen, at least one other former Trump henchman was implicated in the film. Shortly before the premiere Roger Stone tweeted that Strong's portrayal of his old friend Cohn “is uncanny in its accuracy.” (Stone, by the way, did not comment on his own presence in the film, which includes a scene in which a Speedo-clad Stone refills Cohn's cocktail while the elderly lawyer bakes in the tanning bed.) “No matter what your partisan background is, that is, people discover the humanity in these characters,” Sherman said on stage.

As a Danish-Iranian, Abassi has an outsider's perspective on the American political system. “When you're in the Middle East, it's almost like you're living downstream from this palace and the sewage flows through the place where you live,” the director explained during the question-and-answer session. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an environmental king – shit’s going to go down anyway… “It doesn’t matter if it’s a Democratic or Republican president – ​​we’re going to lose out anyway.”