Well, here it is, the first trailer for The Apprentice, Ali Abassi’s film about Donald Trump and Roy Cohn and their f-cked up history, and the early years in which Cohn mentored Trump into the, er, man we know today. 

 

You know what? It doesn’t look bad. Looks good, even! If I wasn’t perilously afraid for the future of my republic, I’d probably be way into this. But I AM perilously afraid for the future of my republic, which Donald Trump has harmed, possibly irreparably. And also, I think giving Trump any amount of attention, regardless of whether or not it’s flattering, merely feeds his ego and he f-cking loves that he lives rent free in Hollywood’s brain, and this isn’t helping. Anyway.

 

The trailer dropped the same day as the US presidential debate, and that’s not a coincidence. The film opens in North America on October 11, three weeks before the US election. I highly doubt anyone involved in the release and marketing of The Apprentice thinks they’ll have a material impact on the election—a movie is not going to sway anyone from voting for Trump—but clearly, they want to capitalize on the election to increase attention for the film. Sure, fine, commit to the bit. It’s hard to get people to go to the movies these days, do whatever you must to capture people’s attention. 

As for the movie itself, it does look good. Like, imagine the characters are named literally anything else, and you can see it, right? The dark comedy vibes, the trophy wife who hates her husband, the toxic mentor-protégé relationship, the guy who sucks at his job getting better at his job by becoming a caricature of the Monopoly Man. There is a lot to like here, never mind that I like Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, and Maria Bakalova as actors enough to want to see them work together on screen. I just wish it was in any other movie.

 

At dinner the other night, Lainey, Kayleigh Donaldson, Kathleen, and I tried to figure out who the contenders are for Best Actor. Best Actress is already shaping up to be highly competitive, with a contingent of 90s stars leading the way (Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie, Demi Moore), as well as Oscar stalwarts like Amy Adams and Julianne Moore, and next-gen stars like Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh, and the breakout stars like Anora’s Mikey Madison and Emilia Perez’s Karla Sofia Gascon. Plus, Marianne Jean-Baptiste is coming on strong since Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths premiered at TIFF! 

By comparison, the Best Actor race looks a little thin. In no particular order, the early contenders are:

Ralph Fiennes – Conclave 

Daniel Craig – Queer

Adrien Brody – The Brutalist

Timothee Chalamet* – A Complete Unknown

John David Washington – The Piano Lesson

Colman Domingo – Sing Sing

 

Colman Domingo SHOULD be a major contender for Sing Sing, which is both a better performance and better film than Rustin, but distributor A24 fumbled the release, going too slow with the platform release through late summer, failing to capitalize on either Colman’s momentum coming out of the 2023 awards season, or going into this awards season. And Chalamet has an asterisk on his name because no one has actually seen that film yet. 

Sebastian Stan is also a contender, but he has two films this year, The Apprentice and A Different Man, both hailed as his strongest work to date. So, we’ll have to see how these films perform to get a sense of where he’ll throw his energy. A Different Man isn’t the kind of movie you expect to have big box office, while The Apprentice is clearly going for a more high risk/high reward marketing formula. Ultimately, it will come down to whichever one catches more heat, but realistically, he won’t campaign for both. The odds of getting double nominated in the same category are vanishingly small, the strategic move is to campaign for the film with the higher profile that more people are likely to see. 

 

But that’s for after the film comes out. First, we have to get through the release of The Apprentice. I love to watch Sebastian Stan play rich weirdos, he’s so good at it and he always picks out one terribly unflattering detail to highlight—when he played Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev in Dumb Money, it was how he seemed physically incapable of forming a smile—and I can already see this will be a performance fine tuned on unflattering details. I just wish it was about literally anyone else.