Actor Sebastian Stan got his big break when he played Bucky Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He’s played the role on the big screen and had his own series in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Stan has taken that notoriety and spun it off into some interesting projects, including Tonya Harding’s husband Jeff Gillooly in I, Tonya and Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee in Hulu’s Pam & Tommy. Stan seems to like playing real people, and it doesn’t get realer than this: according to Deadline, he will play none other than former president Donald Trump in a new movie called The Apprentice.
Did anybody see this coming? For context, Stan will be playing a younger version of Donald Trump. The Apprentice is set during the 1970s and 80s, when Trump was building his real estate business in New York. The title is kind of confusing, because Trump was famously the host of a reality show called The Apprentice, but that began in 2004, when Trump was in his 60s. For the movie The Apprentice, Trump will be in his 30s. See what I mean?
But maybe we’re missing the forest for the trees here: a Marvel superhero is going to play Donald Trump. That’s pretty wild. The movie will also focus on Trump’s relationship with his mentor Roy Cohn, a conservative lawyer and power broker who, incidentally, was secretly gay and died of AIDS in the 1980s, maintaining to his dying day that he actually had liver cancer. That could make for a dramatic movie, right?
Cohn will be played by Jeremy Strong, who won a Golden Globe Award for his performance as Kendall Roy in HBO’s Succession. That’s another major bit of casting news; Succession was a big hit and was set in the same New York business world in which Trump and Cohn operated. It fits. Meanwhile, Bulgarian actor Maria Bakalova (who got an Oscar nomination for her performance in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, of all things) will play Donald Trump’s first wife Ivana. The movie will be directed by Ali Abbasi, who’s directed films like Holy Spider as well as a couple episodes of HBO’s The Last of Us.
The Apprentice has producers on board from outfits like Scythia Films, Taylored Films and Profile Pictures, but doesn’t seem to have a major distributor signed up, at least not yet. Will studios want to touch this? This is a movie about a famously vindictive man who is currently mounting a bid to retake the presidency even as he stands trial for fraud, amid several other indictments. It is a hot potato of a picture, although it’s also very timely, which means people could be interested to see it in theaters down the line.
Why can’t he just play a young Luke Skywalker like we all wanted?😭
— Teddy Halford (@TeddyHalford) November 29, 2023
I still can’t get over the strangeness of picturing Bucky Barnes as Donald Trump. This movie will be a goldmine for someone out there who specializes in making stringy blonde wigs.
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