'Succession' Actor Jeremy Strong Plays Trump Lawyer Roy Cohn on 'The Apprentice': NPR

Jeremy Strong, left, plays lawyer Roy Cohn and Sebastian Stan is a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice. Apprentice Productions Ontario Inc. .

toggle captionApprentice Productions Ontario Inc.

Less than a month before the presidential election, Jeremy Strong's new film, The Apprentice, is causing a sensation. The film centers on a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) as he attempts to establish himself in his father's business as a real estate developer. Strong plays Roy Cohn, Trump's lawyer and mentor.

In May, Trump's lawyers sent a cease and desist letter, attempting to block the film's release in the United States. The Apprentice opens Friday.

“No one would touch this movie. The studios were afraid to touch it. The streamers were afraid to touch it,” Strong says. “They were afraid of litigation. And they were afraid of the repercussions of a possible Trump administration.”

In a statement to The Associated Press, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said the Trump team would take legal action to address the blatantly false claims made by these fake filmmakers.

Strong notes that the decision to block the film seems straight out of the Cohn playbook: “Deny, deflect, delay.” …If you do this vehemently and hard enough, you will succeed. »

In a statement to NPR, Cheung called the film a pure malicious smear and an example of election interference by Hollywood elites just before November.

In 1954, Cohn served as chief advisor to Senator Joseph McCarthy's Senate investigations into communist influence in the U.S. government. Cohn and McCarthy also collaborated on an executive order banning homosexuals from serving in the federal government. Cohn died in 1986 shortly after being disbarred.

Strong is no stranger to difficult or unlikable characters. He won an Emmy for his portrayal of Kendall Roy on Succession, and he also played Lee Harvey Oswald on Parkland. He says he prepared for The Apprentice by reading Cohn's writing and setting aside his judgment.

“As an actor, you really have to check that at the door,” he says. “It's an empathetic practice. … I'm just trying to inhabit it in a fully dimensional way.”

Interview Highlights

On the responsibility of playing a real person in The Apprentice

If there is an improvisation, it is taken, generally in my case, from historical documents. So, for example, Roy has written a number of books and there are wonderful turns of phrase that Roy would use, things like a dead duck or a fake $3 bill, things that I put in the movie , … just these little granular details that helped give the dimension and the weight, but also the precision. I absolutely feel a kind of loyalty to the truth with a capital “T”, which is funny in this case because Roy Cohn, if he means anything to me, he's like the granddaddy of alternative facts. He's not someone who really embraces truth with a capital “T.” He believed that truth was a toy with which you could do whatever you wanted.

On an improvised take from the last scene of Succession, where he scales the fence at the river, insinuating that Kendall is attempting suicide

Strong says his Succession character, Kendall Roy, lost everything during the series finale. HBO .

rock legend HBO

I think you learn over the course of your life to obey your deepest instincts. That's it, it's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. I find that I generally don't believe in the importance of asking permission because, especially now, there are so many levels of risk aversion and safety orientation. [production staff]and these things are all important, but I was obeying a deep impulse.

My feeling and my strong belief was and still is but it's Jesse [Armstrong]Ultimately, this was an extinction-level event for Kendall and there was no going back. …And at that moment, he had lost everything. He had lost his father. He had lost his brothers and sisters. He had lost his ex-wife. He had lost his children. It had lost its so-called reason for being. And also, remember, he was a drug addict. So I just didn't believe he would come back from that. I think Jesse's timing is extremely powerful and he's sort of frozen in a sort of inner cry. And I love that he chose that.

On Kendall's famous rap, “L to the OG”, performed at a dinner celebrating her father's 50 years with the company on Succession

Nick Britell, the composer, called me and said, “Hey, I have this rap. Maybe you could do it at dinner? We were filming it three days later, and he gave it to me played it on the phone and I have a recording of it in my voice notes, and that's pretty much what it turned out to be. I made up the chorus and the melody and I made it up in the car while. we were driving from Glasgow to Dundee. just a pretty one-off thing in directing you're just throwing something and you're dancing as fast as you can and I asked the costume designer, I designed a swimsuit that. I thought I could carry it, and they made it for me and had it three days later.

YouTube

I didn't want anyone to hear it before the first take. So one thing I love about this scene is the look on Kieran. [Culkin] and Sarah [Snook] and everyone's faces, which is just amazing because they had never seen me do that before.

On whether staying away from other actors on set helps his character

This hasn't always been a popular answer, but if I'm honest I'd say yes. [It’s about] take a break from the social realm so you can be in touch with yourself on a deeper level.

Kendall, as written, was someone who was going through very deep existential agony and dealing with crisis after crisis, including the death of a person weighing on him. …I don't take this lightly. And I think my job is to really understand that and try to inhabit it so that when this character says, “I'm blown to pieces,” on the dirt floor of the parking lot at the end of season 4, that I can think these words. So I have to do whatever it takes to earn this and get to this place. And it often doesn't involve having a good social friendship with other actors.

[But] you don't do this alone. It might sound like I'm saying you're doing this alone, but I'm not saying that. …When you're between “Action!” and “Cut!” it's something you do together. Personally, I think that anything you want to do outside of “Action!” and “Cut!” is their own business. And different people approach this work in different ways and need different things to fully serve it.

On memorizing lines

I learned theater since I was little and did theater my whole life until about 10 years ago, then I started doing more film and television. But even on Succession, you learn a 90 or 100 page script every 10 days. And I have to learn this backwards, left and right, and if I was thrown out of a plane in the middle of a cyclone, I would still know it. This is how well I have to know a text to be able to internalize it as I feel the need. It's a muscle. So maybe it's just habit and repetition, but I have to work really hard at it. Some people have a photographic memory or can simply learn things very easily. But I've never been someone for whom everything comes particularly easy.

On how his parents' work influenced him

My father worked in juvenile justice and ran those prisons primarily for the Department of Youth Services. My mother was a palliative care nurse. They were both donors of sorts. They're both empathetic and I think they're really brave people.

I think they really shielded my brother and I from that and shielded us from all that heaviness or drama. … It really meant a lot to me, because they did something that really mattered to them. …I think there's something that was imprinted on me about how central my parents' work was to their lives and how much they devoted themselves to it.

Siblings Roy Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Shiv (Sarah Snook) comfort Kendall (Strong) as he makes a seismic confession in the Season 3 finale of Succession. HBO .

rock legend HBO

Seeing action as a release from one's own anxieties

I would also say that taking action and the impulse to do so was initially an escape and a desire to escape from where I was living, from the heaviness I felt, from the frayed and strained financial situation and the difficulties that 'had my parents. It's a bit of a Houdini act, because you can enter an imaginary world and free yourself from all that. Be free from your circumstances and be free from yourself, because the self, as I think we all know, can be a kind of prison. Taking action is therefore a liberating process, because you can immediately free yourself from the prison of yourself, your environment and circumstances.

Leaving his characters even Kendall Roy behind

I have a stack of scripts in my office and it's like this stack of lives I've had: when they're done, they're done and you just put them away.

Jeremy Fort

I have a pile of scripts in my office and it's like this pile of lives that I've had, when they're over, they're over, and you put them away and I put them away because I have a life and children. …So I don't feel any more kinship with this role than with any other role I've ever played, which might seem strange, because I know it's what made me famous. most for [and it was] a seven year thing. Maybe one day I'll look back at all of this and realize the magnitude of what it was. But I probably had to protect myself from it because I don't think it would serve me, if that makes sense. I think you do your job, you do it the same day, you give it your all, and that's it. That's all you need to be involved with. So whether it becomes the biggest thing in the world, whether they release a single, whether something wins an Oscar, that's not your concern. Your concern is to be at full throttle when you do it.

Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

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