Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice”, the story of how a young Donald Trump fell on track and under the Trolletal’s Stava Roy Cohn in the 1970s, struggled to receive funding and an American edition after its premiums in Cannes last May. But it did unexpectedly well in Oscar nominations, with Sebastian Stan who broke into the best acting category for his performance such as Trump and Jeremy Strong Landing a best supportive actor nomination to play Cohn, a evil fighter and completed gay man who gave it Saved Tyconen rules for survival that he still uses: to always attack, admit nothing, deny everything and never admit defeat.
What led you to Roy Cohn?
Another filmmaker had contacted me five or six years ago about playing Roy. There was not a script, but I went and I looked at some of the documentaries. Matt Tyrnauer’s (“Where’s My Roy Cohn?”) Was a really brilliant documentary. And then I went down into the rabbit hole because I never really met a man like him, both monstrous and childish at the same time. He is a part of Ghoul, part lost boy, part Kingmaker, part IAgo.
What did it require to get you from being fascinated by him to agree to play him for Ali Abbasi?
Gabe Sherman had written a good script based on extensive research and journalistic truth. And Ali was this type of punk-rock Lynchian filmmaker, and I thought the alchemy for these two would give something interesting. Rilke said, “Sure, all great art is a product of being in danger.” I am always looking for a plank to go out, and I couldn’t find a longer, bigger, more treacherous, steep plank to go out than trying to play Roy Cohn.
So then it becomes a matter of trying to deepen self in character as much as you can?
Yes. I have done historical characters before, in “The Big Short” and “Selma” and “(the trial against) Chicago 7.” And if I have a way to approach it, it’s about trying to do all the research, reading each book. Roy wrote some books. Sidney Zion wrote a fantastic book about Roy and there is a huge amount of archival material. He was at many talk shows, he was a total talk show. And then there is a real amount of Roy.
There is a fantastic interview he did with Gore Vidal that I looked until my eyes turned blue and fell out of my head. (Flirts, pointing to his eyes.) That’s why they look like this. It is only endless to observe and study and interrogate and become a kind of forensic detective on an emotional and spiritual level. And talk to people who knew him. Ken Auletta, which had interviewed him for esquire In 1977, it said of all the people he had encountered – and he wrote on (Harvey) Weinstein and others – that Roy was the most monstrous person he ever encountered.
He is like a clusterf -k of a person, if I can say it. It was impossible to unite aspects of his character, and I think it is correct. I think they were not reconciled in his life, and that was what created so much pain. But really denial of his own nature and the level of self-deception, denial of reality-it’s his heritage, I think. Self -denial was the dark heart for me.
Is it exhausting to immerse you in a guy who to?
Do you know what is interesting? I remember talking to (Robert) Downey before I started. He had seen the Tyrnauer documentary, and he said, “He is one such merry Guy.”
He was exactly right. Roy was joy. So while others think he is contemptible and calls him one of the worst people in the 1900s – I don’t know I agree with it, but he was up there – he was joy. He had a huge charismatic force, and it was one of the things that loved people for him, I dare say, and one of the things that lasted people to his successor. I thought of Roy type of hanging over Capitol Rotunda (on the opening day). And part of what he went on, besides the dark art of dissimilation and fraud, was this denial.
There is really a feeling that when we watch this movie we are still surrounded by signs of what Roy Cohn did.
Oh, no question. I think it is very upsetting to watch this movie now, which I have done once since Trump was elected. But I would take what you said even further to say that Roy’s ideology of Brute Force and error information and aggression are coded in almost everything the president does. It is the well he pulls – to me, the poisoned well water. Roy’s influence cannot be overestimated. I think we live in his world now, and the movie has a lot to say about how we came here.
I did not go into the movie feeling or wanted to feel any sympathy for Roy Cohn, and yet I came out and felt a little.
Thanks. I believe that as an actor we have to approach what we do humanistic, to interrupt our assessment and try to get involved in empathy. This has been controversial, but I would say that we should consider having empathy for those we consider not worthy of empathy.
I’m not saying we should condone them. There is a great William Saroyan quote where he says: “Disgust evil and wickedness, but not men with wickedness and evil. These understand. “And I think it’s the role of art and film to try to understand these people. We are complicated if we have not been able to try to understand a human level why these people are as they are and what infernal engines drive them.
You don’t go into these things with a plan or agenda: “Oh, I want to make people feel sympathy for Roy Cohn.” I just allow it to get through me. My friend Joshua Oppenheimer, who made the incredible documentary “The act of killing”, texted me and mentioned the end of that movie. Joshua was on a roof with a man who was a death group leader, who coughed (and retached) as he stared into the abyss of his own wasted life, according to Joshua’s words. And I think he felt Roy Cohn did it in this movie.
It was my experience-to the veil of self-deception and denial is lifted and he stared into a wide regret for the endless emptiness of his own wasted life. It made me feel that his life was a tragedy, and I felt sorry for him.
Ali Abbasi is not known for being underestimated and naturalistic, and Cohn and Trump were guys who work at a theater level anyway.
Sure. I love it.
You don’t want to make them more of a caricatur than they had done themselves. So how do you figure out how big you can go?
That’s such a big question. I think it must be calibrated nicely. I would say two things. Some of my favorite performances ever, which I have been most inspired by, contain an element of theatrical and is increased. Laurence Olivier speaks in his autobiography about this term he called Theater ModAs for me, if there are virtues that actors can have, the two that mean most would be vulnerability and theater mod. And theatricality can mean size, but it must also be completely founded in truth.
And the other thing I would say, and that’s something Stella Adler said, she said you can be as big as life. It’s not about being big. It’s about being as great as life. No more, no less than they are. I think you have to calibrate it to the subject. What I was trying to do was not to interpret Roy. I tried to be inhabited Roy when I saw him, with a smooth look.
Roger Stone knew Roy well, and he told me he felt he was in the room with Roy. It’s fun to say, because I never thought I would feel gratifying with a compliment from that person, but it was gratifying because what you want to do is not to decorate it. You want to meet Bullseye when it comes to doing them with accuracy and then letting it catch fire. For me, the work is meaningless unless it causes fire. I don’t know how to explain it, but we all know what it means.
A version of this story first appeared in Down to the Wire Issue by Thewrap’s Awards Magazine. Read more from the question here.
