Sebastian Stan is a busy man these days. The actor is juggling two high profile releases with his ongoing role as the Winter Soldier in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The role, and the film that has captivated most viewers' attention, however, is Donald Trump in The Apprentice.
Stan plays a younger version of Trump, as the future President rises to power in 1980s New York. It was always going to be a challenging task to play one of the most famous (and polarizing) men on the planet, but Stan told Variety that the specific challenges he encountered during production were not the ones he expected.
Sebastian Stan watched old footage of Trump to prep
The actor found that nailing Donald Trump's speech pattern was particularly tricky. He was keenly aware of avoiding the broad, Saturday Night Live impressions of the former President, and made a point of trying to adopt a voice that closer, and therefore more subtle, in The Apprentice.
How did Stan go about doing this? By assembling an extensive library of Trump footage that ran from the 1970s to today. Depending on the time period of a given scene in the film, the actor would pull up his phone, watch the era appropriate clip, and lock into what he felt was an authentic depiction:
"[There were] 562 videos that I had pulled with pictures from different time periods. So I could pull out his speech patterns and try to improvise like him."
Stan was encouraged to improvise in character
The actor also worked with The Apprentice director Ali Abbasi to recreate Trump's gift of gab. There would be entire scenes in which Stan went off book and improvised entire exchanges with actors in an attempt to capture the cadence of Trump's real-life exchanges with Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong).
Ironically, the weight gain proved to be the easiest part of portraying Donald Trump. Sebastian Stan gained a total of 15 pounds at the behest of Abbasi, despite only having two months to prepare. "You’d be surprised," the actor quipped. "You can gain a lot of weight in two months."
The Apprentice is set for U.S. release on October 11.