Succession star Jeremy Strong has welcomed criticism of his role in the controversial new Donald Trump biopic, The Apprentice.
Strong addressed the discourse surrounding straight actors portraying LGBTQ+ roles, describing it as “absolutely valid.”
The Apprentice stars Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, once Trump’s lawyer and political fixer. It focuses on his time working in real estate, and his rise to power in America, and also charts his relationship with his first with, Ivana Trump, played by Maria Bakalova, and it features Trump family patriarch Fred Trump, played by Martin Donovan.
The movie includes a number of controversial scenes, including one that depicts Trump raping his then-wife, Ivana, during an argument. In her 1990 divorce deposition, Ivana Trump alleged she was sexually assaulted by her husband, but she disavowed the allegation when Trump was running for president in 2015. Ivana Trump died in 2022.
The former president’s legal team has attempted to block the release of the film, which received an eight-minute standing ovation at its Cannes Film Festival debut.
On May 24, Trump’s attorneys sent a cease-and-desist letter to the filmmakers as they sought to block the release and marketing of the film, as per Variety.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times about his role in the film, Strong was asked if he believes there is any merit to criticism leveled at straight actors for playing gay characters and receiving critical acclaim for this.
“It’s absolutely valid,” Strong responded. “I’m sort of old fashioned, maybe, in the belief that fundamentally, it’s [about] a person’s artistry.
“That’s your job as an actor. The task, in a way, is to render something that is not necessarily your native habitat.”
Strong said that he doesn’t think it’s necessary for gay roles to be played by gay performers. But that it would be “good if that were given more weight.”
Cohn was a closeted gay man, who died from AIDS in 1986. He never admitted publicly to being homosexual, and he never disclosed that he was HIV positive. Cohn was one of the key characters in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, a two-part Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play, which pins Cohn as the “polestar of human evil.”
“I feel like I could get in trouble for saying anything positive about him,” Strong remarked, comparing Cohn to the character of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. He described the attorney as a “cancerous conundrum,” and a “demonic Peter Pan.”
The Apprentice is set to be released on October 11. The film was first announced in May 2018, and it was independently produced. The Los Angeles Times reported that it looked as though the film wouldn’t be released until after the 2024 presidential election, and that it could remain on the shelf indefinitely. It was since been picked up by Briarcliff Entertainment.
“We sort of narrowly escaped the jaws of being effectively censored in this country,” Strong said. “That’s something that happens in Russia, North Korea. Not democratic countries. I think people in Hollywood were really wary of touching this,” he said, describing it as “disheartening.”
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