Sebastian Stan said in a post-screening Q&A of his film “The Apprentice” Tuesday night that his participation in Variety‘s “Actors on Actors” video and TV series is halted because no other actor wants to talk about Trump. Stan plays the president-elect in the Ali Abbasi film that covers Trump’s early years and rise to initial prominence as a Manhattan real estate mogul.
Variety co-editor in chief Ramin Setoodeh confirms that this is indeed the case to IndieWire. “What Sebastian said is accurate,” Setoodeh said in a statement. “We invited him to participate in ‘Actors on Actors,’ the biggest franchise of awards season, but other actors didn’t want to pair with him because they didn’t want to talk about Donald Trump.”
In his remarks, captured on video and posted on Twitter, Stan said that he thinks this refusal to engage at all with Trump as a subject is unfortunate, and even bad for the country.
“The amount of love that I’ve received from some of the biggest — both of us I think [referring to Abbasi] — in terms of actors, directors, producers, writers who’ve seen the movie and rave about it… But then for instance I had an offer to do Variety’s ‘Actor on Actor’ [sic] this Friday and I couldn’t find another actor to do it with me because they were too afraid to go and talk about this movie so I couldn’t do it. And it doesn’t matter, that’s okay, that’s not to point a finger at anybody. That’s not pointing at anyone specific, we couldn’t get past the publicists or the people representing them because they were too afraid to talk about this movie.”
“That’s when I think we lose the situation because if it really becomes that fear or discomfort to talk about this then we’re really going to have a problem. There was an op-ed in the New York Times recently that I thought was really interesting, which said that ‘we have to stop pretending that Trump is not one of us.’ And that’s a really difficult thing to deal with at the moment, and I understand the emotions are very high, but I think that’s the only way you’re going to grasp this film. All it’s saying is you cannot keep casting this person aside, especially after they get the popular vote. Should we not give this a closer look and try to understand what it is about this person that’s even driving that. I don’t know if the love is gonna translate into action, but it’s certainly there from what we’re hearing.”
