Sebastian Stan did a lot of homework to prepare for his role as former President Donald Trump in the upcoming biopic The Apprentice, even beyond the physical transformation he undertook.
Sebastian Stan Reveals How He Got in Trump’s Head to Play Him in ‘The Apprentice’: ‘He’s a Lot Smarter Than People Want to Say’
Stan, who is well known for his roles in the technicolor Marvel Cinematic Universe as well as portraying morally questionable husbands (in movies like I, Tonya and the Hulu series Pam & Tommy), took his role as Trump during his younger years very seriously, as he told Variety’s Daniel D’Addario in a profile published on Thursday.
In order to capture Trump’s very specific way of speaking, Stan said that he watched hours of footage of Trump from the ’70s and ’80s, when The Apprentice is set:
“I had 130 videos on his physicality on my phone,” Stan says. “And 562 videos that I had pulled with pictures from different time periods — from the ’70s all the way to today — so I could pull out his speech patterns and try to improvise like him.” Stan, deep in character, would ad-lib entire scenes at director Ali Abbasi’s urging, drawing on the details he’d learned from watching Trump and reading interviews to understand precisely how to react in each moment.
“Ali could come in on the second take and say, ‘Why don’t you talk a little bit about the taxes and how you don’t want to pay?’ So I had to know what charities they were going to in 1983. Every night I would go home and try not only to prepare for the day that was coming, but also to prepare for where Ali was going to take this.”
Stan also went into the physicality of Trump, which involved gaining 15 pounds and shedding all of his Marvel muscle. But it also involved the way Trump speaks:
“I started to realize that I needed to start speaking with my lips in a different way,” Stan says. “A lot of that came from the consonants. If I’m talking, I’m moving forward.” On film, Stan shapes his mouth like he can’t wait to get the plosives out, puckering without quite tipping into parody. “The consonants naturally forced your lips forward.”
