The day after the Cannes Film Festival premiere of “The Apprentice,” a biopic about Donald J. Trump, the former president responded to the film, calling it “malicious defamation” and threatening legal action.
“This garbage is pure fiction that sensationalizes lies that have long been debunked,” said Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman.
Directed by Ali Abbasi and written by author Gabriel Sherman, “The Apprentice” follows Trump (Sebastian Stan) as an ambitious young man trying to establish himself as a real estate mogul. He finds a mentor in the shrewd lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and a first wife in model Ivana Zelnickova (Maria Bakalova), though Trump is willing to discard both once they are no longer useful to him.
The film is hardly a flattering portrayal of the former president and includes scenes in which the business mogul goes under the knife for liposuction and scalp surgery to fix his bald patch. In the most controversial sequence, Trump’s character sexually assaults his wife after she criticizes his appearance. (Ivana, who died in 2022, accused Trump of rape in her divorce filing, although she later disavowed the accusation.)
