After a whirlwind fever dream of anticipation, Ali Abbasi‘s new film “The Apprentice” will finally hit theaters October 11. The Donald Trump biopic, which premiered at Cannes earlier this year, was acquired three months after its premiere for U.S. distribution by Briarcliff Entertainment.
Though Abbasi hasn’t connected with Trump personally, he is looking forward to the former President seeing the film, as he told IndieWire at the film’s premiere in New York City on Tuesday, October 8. “Look, as anyone else who has done a movie about a subject about a person, I would be super excited to see what he thinks of the movie either way.””
“Do I think he’s gonna love it? Probably not,” he continued. “Do I think he’s gonna hate it? I don’t think so. Honestly, I think he would see our desire to depict them as human beings and whatever he thinks of that, I would be excited to hear what he thinks. And he probably has a lot of things that I got wrong he wants to bash me with.”
The Trump campaign even issued legal threats to distributors who sought to release the film over the summer, in part because it contains a disturbing sequence in which Sebastian Stan-as-Trump rapes his first wife Ivana. Following the convicted felon’s rise to power, Abbasi tells us that Stan definitely had to evaluate all aspects of accepting a role like this. “Of course, he had to assess.”
“Of course he had to think about it,” he continued. “I think that that’s a sign of professionalism. This is a big undertaking. Not only do you have to do the character, you get it right, all the technical aspects, but there’s also an aftermath. There’s also what’s happening in the streets, there’s also political context. We talked about it obviously, but I think he always told me that if this is ever going to fall apart, it wouldn’t be because of me and he kept his word.”
The timing for the release could not be more perfect, with less than a month until one of the most important elections in our nation’s history. “We tried to do this since 2018,” Abbasi said reflecting on the timing of it debuting in American cinemas. “At some point it would end up before and after some election.”
“But yeah, I mean, like when we showed the movie in Cannes, I was like, ‘Okay, I really hope that we can come out before the elections.’ I didn’t know that because of all these circumstances, we could come so close to the election. That’s a bit eerie.”
“The Apprentice” premieres October 11 in theaters. Check out the trailer here.
