Mr Viral
The Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice is gorier and more gruesome than you’d expect for a film about the former president. A Frankenstein-style origin story, the movie, opening in theaters Friday, stars a golden-haired Sebastian Stan as Trump and a very bronzed Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, the menacing lawyer who molded Trump into his likeness. There’s a scene featuring Trump on an operating table as his scalp is sliced open and sewn back together, an overt nod to Mary Shelley’s monster. The film’s Trump pops diet pills, gets plastic surgery, and, in the movie’s most controversial sequence, sexually assaults his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova)—script details rooted in research by The Apprentice screenwriter (and VF special correspondent) Gabe Sherman.
As Sherman explains, Trump and Cohn were such unconventional characters in real life—Trump, a Diet Coke–swilling germaphobe, and Cohn, who loved slathering bacon in cream cheese and kept a stuffed frog collection—that dramatizing them didn’t require much stretching. “Obviously it was a challenge to write the script,” says Sherman. “But I didn’t have to add much flourish to their characters, because the real versions were so interesting.”
Ahead, Sherman takes us on a tour of the film’s most colorful moments—explaining the events and accounts that inspired them, and why they were all integral to Trump’s origin story.
Roy Cohn negotiates Trump’s prenupYes, Roy Cohn was one of Manhattan’s most premiere power brokers and most ruthless prosecutors. But after meeting Trump in 1979, the lawyer who helped send the Rosenbergs to the electric chair took such a personal interest in Trump that he interrupted his hardball dealmaking to micromanage Trump’s prenup to his first wife, Ivana.
The scene comes about halfway through the film, when Trump still resembles a warm-blooded human. So in love with Ivana is he that Cohn has to essentially splash cold water on his protégé’s face and remind him to protect his finances. “Donald, let me put it to you this way: Would you sign a contract and give up half your assets?” Cohn asks Trump from a tanning bed. “Trust me: I almost married Barbara Walters and then I wised up.” (While Walters was, in fact, friends with Cohn, the late journalist said that Cohn exaggerated their relationship: “I was his claim to heterosexuality,” she explained in 2008.)
Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn.By Pief Weyman / Briarcliff Entertainment / Everett Collection.
In The Apprentice, Cohn presides over the prenup negotiation in a restaurant high above Manhattan. “It’s not the magna carta,” Cohn condescends as Ivana pages through the agreement. When she gets to the gift-give-back clause Cohn has inserted, she throws her ring on the table and walks out.
“That scene is almost verbatim dramatized on what actually happened,” says Sherman. “Roy insisted on doing Donald’s prenup. It was a few days before the wedding, and it almost blew up the wedding. She was so furious about Roy’s prenup that Ivana insisted on Donald giving her money as a signing bonus.” The bonus ended up being $100,000. “When I was researching this movie, I didn’t have to make, really, anything up. The real stuff was so weird and better than anything that I could imagine as a screenwriter. So I just tried, as much as possible, to write what actually happened as reported at the time.”
Trumps pops diet pills…and suffers erectile dysfunctionTrump is famously a teetotaler, but the film shows the future president popping diet pills to keep his ballooning waistline in check. Sherman credits Harry Hurt’s 1993 Trump biography, Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump—“a remarkable book, and I recommend anyone read it”—for this detail and other character gems.
“There’s been other reporting over the years that Trump, in the ’80s, took these pills that essentially are amphetamines, and they kind of give you manic energy,” says Sherman. “It’s always been one of the explanations for why he went on this deal-making binge. After he finished Trump Tower, he ended up buying all these casinos and starting the airline [Trump Shuttle], and buying the yacht [Trump Princess], and buying Mar-a-Lago, and buying the Plaza Hotel, and basically just bankrupted himself in the span of six years. I felt it was one of the themes of the film—as Trump gains more power, he loses touch with his own humanity. I thought of the diet pills as him trying to develop this superpower of never needing to sleep.”
In The Lost Tycoon, Hurt reports that “Donald was so delighted with the results” of the pills that he started recommending them to his brother Robert, various friends, “and celebrity acquaintances such as Diana Ross.” The pills, Hurt wrote, “made the already frenetic Manhattan mogul a holy terror both at home and at the office.” (Trump denied the claims in Hurt’s book at the time.)
In The Apprentice, his pill intake causes Trump to suffer erectile dysfunction. Because of this unfortunate side effect, the future president quits the diet pills. “That’s what drives him to the plastic surgeon,” Sherman says. “The diet pills aren’t working, so he’s got to figure out another solution to his weight problems.”
The obvious solution, though, is not for Trump. When a doctor in the film suggests exercise, Trump replies, “You know, that’s going to kill you.” This, too, is a documented Trump belief.
Donald gets liposuction and scalp-reduction surgeryTrump’s alleged plastic surgery procedures—which he has denied having—were first described by Ivana in her 1990 divorce deposition. Both the liposuction and scalp reduction were reportedly performed by Ivana’s plastic surgeon, Steven Hoefflin—who also operated on Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Joan Rivers. The scalp reduction, done in the film to hide a bald spot on the back of Trump’s head, was “considered a high-risk procedure,” according to Sherman. “It was very risky, and doctors recommended not to do it.”
Though the film is a personal origin story, the scalp reduction is shown in bloody, gruesome detail—an overt homage to Frankenstein’s monster. “It’s really the final stage of making the monster that Roy Cohn created,” explains Sherman. “So visually, seeing him being operated on, it’s like Darth Vader getting his mask.”
Hurt’s account of the alleged treatment was arguably even more gruesome.
After shearing off a section of Donald’s scalp and closing the wound, he attempts to cover most of the remaining bald spot by stamping dye dispensed from a tattooing machine that looks something like a domestic-grade sewing machine.… It is not a pleasant experience.… [Trump] finds himself suffering nagging headaches caused by the shrinking of the scalp, the stretching of the skin, and the pain of the initial incision. He is also upset that the color of the tattoo on his head does not yet match the color of his hair and concludes that Hoefflin must have used the wrong color dye.… The painful aftereffects of the scalp reduction operation and the discovery of Hoefflin’s supposed error enrage Donald, who reacts like a wounded elephant.
According to Hurt, Trump called the surgeon and threatened to kill him, sue him, and destroy his practice. (Trump has denied the incident as well as the surgery.)
Donald sexually assaults Ivana in their Trump Tower apartmentThis scene is certainly the most controversial in The Apprentice—it drew gasps during the film’s Cannes Film Festival premiere. In the biopic, a lingerie-clad Ivana approaches Trump in the hopes of sharing an intimate moment. Trump rejects the overture, telling her, “I’m just not attracted to you anymore.… I’m touching those fake plastic tits.”
“You made me do it,” she says, pointing out that he urged her to get breast implants.
“Well, maybe they were a mistake.”
Their fight turns physical when Trump forces Ivana to the ground and assaults her. But Sherman points out that the actual alleged encounter—which was described by Ivana in her divorce deposition—is even more disturbing. (Twenty-five years after making her allegation, Ivana recanted some of her sworn testimony, including the alleged assault, while Trump was running for president.)
Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump, Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump.By Pief Weyman / Briarcliff Entertainment / Everett Collection.
“Hurt reports that Trump was recovering at home from the scalp reduction surgery, and it’s incredibly painful. He was in crazy amounts of pain. And he gets into a fight with Ivana and says something like, ‘You want to feel how I feel?’ And Trump pins her down and actually yanks out pieces of Ivana’s hair and then rapes her. So the scene is actually much more graphic than what we depicted.”
In Hurt’s version, Trump tells Ivana, “Your fucking doctor has ruined me!” before grabbing her hair in a spot that corresponds to where he received his scalp reduction. “Donald starts ripping out Ivana’s hair by the handful, as if he is trying to make her feel the same kind of pain that he is feeling,” he writes. After the alleged assault, according to Hurt, Ivana locked herself in her mother’s room and cried there for the rest of the night. The next day, according to The Lost Tycoon, Trump “glares at her and asks with menacing casualness: ‘Does it hurt?’”
In Sherman’s feature about his fight to get The Apprentice distributed, the screenwriter describes the pressure he and director Ali Abbasi faced to remove this sequence from the film. In the end, they “refused to cut the sexual assault scene because we believed Ivana’s sworn deposition (our producers backed us up).”
Sherman further felt the scene was warranted in The Apprentice because, he wrote, “Trump has been credibly accused of sexual assault by many women over the years.” Trump has denied all such accusations. His lawyers pressured the publishers of The Lost Tycoon to include an updated statement from Ivana that clarified that when she had used the word “rape” under oath, she didn’t mean that Trump assaulted her in a “criminal sense,” only that she felt violated.
The scene brings an abrupt and aggressive end to a marriage that, in The Apprentice at least, seemed initially to be built on genuine love. The first scenes depicting Trump’s relationship with Ivana have a rom-com quality to them, with Trump attempting to woo the elegant Czech model he met in 1976. In one scene, he even skis—a deeply romantic gesture for a man who believes that exercise will cause you to die young. According to The Lost Tycoon, the real Donald went even further to impress Ivana in their courtship: Hurt claims that Trump flew to Aspen and took two weeks worth of private ski lessons, before proposing to Ivana during a Christmas and New Year’s trip spent on the slopes.
Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump, 2024.By Briarcliff Entertainment / Everett Collection.
Sherman used details from contemporaneous stories about Trump and Ivana in these scenes, including Marie Brenner’s VF story “After the Gold Rush.” Says the screenwriter, “I think both in real life and in the script, the turning point in their relationship was that once Ivana started working in the company, Donald couldn’t accept having a strong woman as an equal partner. I think her strength is what initially attracted him to her—that she was a tough, independent woman—but then once he got her, once he won the prize of the marriage, it really unraveled as she wanted more responsibility inside the company. And she was getting press attention. I think that’s also what drove him crazy, that she was getting her name in the papers and becoming almost like a rival to him.”
That said, Sherman adds, “To the degree that Donald Trump can feel love, I do feel like she was the only woman where there was a real love there. Even when she died, I think there was always an affection for her, even though their relationship got destroyed.”
Donald turns away his brother Fred shortly before the elder Trump’s deathIn earlier Apprentice scenes, Donald shows some kindness to his brother Fred—the oldest son and black sheep of the Trump family. But a little over halfway through the film, the alcoholic Fred arrives at Trump’s doorstop in bad shape. Donald hasn’t returned his calls. Fred’s brought a gift for a toddler-aged Don Jr., and a plea for his younger brother. “I know I’m a loser and all that,” he says, broken, his voice quivering. “But my grip’s kind of slipping a little bit. Things are getting a little bit scary. And I want to change.” Donald gives Fred a hug, but when Ivana offers to make up a guest room, Donald recoils. He peels off some bills from his wallet and tells Fred to stay the night at a hotel. Shortly after, Fred dies.
Sherman drew from multiple sources—including the devastating 2020 memoir Too Much and Never Enough, written by Fred’s daughter, Mary—when writing about Trump’s relationship with his older brother. Fred died from an alcoholism-related heart attack in 1981 at the age of 42, when Mary was 16. In the book, Mary describes how her grandfather Fred Sr. relentlessly bullied Fred growing up. (Fred Sr. once reportedly told his oldest son, “Donald is worth 10 of you.”) She claims that Trump went to see a movie alone rather than say goodbye to his brother, who was dying alone in a hospital.
There have been moments throughout the years when Donald has spoken fondly of his late brother. In 2017, he called Fred a “great guy,” the “best-looking guy,” with the “best personality—much better than mine.” In a long-ago Playboy interview, Trump explained, “I saw people really taking advantage of Fred and the lesson I learned was always to keep up my guard one hundred percent, whereas he didn’t. He didn’t feel that there was really reason for that, which is a fatal mistake in life.” He also told the magazine, “Our family environment, the competitiveness, was a negative for Fred…. I was very close to him and it was very sad when he died…toughest situation I’ve had.… But his death affected everything that has come after it…I think constantly that I never really gave him thanks for it. He was the first Trump boy out there, and I subconsciously watched his moves.”
In addition to combing through books and old interviews for information about Trump’s relationship with Fred, Sherman also spoke to people who knew Trump in the ’80s and were familiar with the brotherly Trump dynamic. “Whether [Fred ever] showed up at the apartment, I don’t know if he in fact ever did that. But what I do know is that Donald, in a rare moment of self-reflection, talked in interviews during the 2016 presidential campaign about regretting not doing more for his brother,” says Sherman.
Back then, Trump told The Washington Post, “I do regret having put pressure on him”—urging Fred to take over the family’s real estate business rather than become an airline pilot, which was Fred’s dream. “It was just not his thing…I think the mistake that we made was we assumed that everybody would like it. That would be the biggest mistake.”
Says Sherman, “It really struck me emotionally that he’s been carrying some level of guilt around for the way he and his father belittled his brother, and didn’t help him through his addiction.” Though their final scene together in The Apprentice is fictionalized, Sherman says, “I felt that was a really powerful way to dramatize that because it’s Freddy reaching out at his lowest moment. Donald could have helped him, and he didn’t. Then Freddy dies shortly thereafter.” He adds, “It’s never been explained convincingly, at least to me, how Freddy Trump died. I mean, he was living his final days in the attic of his parents’ house in Queens—basically just drinking himself to death. The official cause was heart attack, but I think his death is essentially a form of suicide because he was drinking himself into the ground.”
Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump.By Briarcliff Entertainment / Everett Collection.
Trump gives a dying Roy Cohn diamond cuff links—which turn out to be fakeSherman says that the cuff links were not in his original script; in fact, Strong brought the idea to him. “Jeremy [Strong] has his processes—he does crazy amounts of research. In another life, he would’ve been a reporter or a writer. He told me about this anecdote, that Trump over the years would give people fake diamond cuff links. I went and did my own research and saw all of these newspaper articles about Trump doing this.”
In The Apprentice, Trump wheels a dying Cohn into his newly acquired Mar-a-Lago resort for a birthday celebration. It’s a sad sequence that encapsulates the men’s reversal in power. Trump has bought this 62,500-square-foot estate, decorated with gold candelabras and oil paintings; the frail Cohn is massively diminished as he dies from AIDS. (In the film, there’s a partially completed portrait of Trump hanging on the wall; Trump explains that it’s unfinished because he didn’t pay the artist in time. Sherman borrowed this detail from his own 2016 trip to Mar-a-Lago.)
In 2016, The New York Times reported that after Cohn won a legal victory for Trump, the real-estate mogul had repaid Cohn by giving him “a pair of diamond-encrusted cuff links and buttons in a Bulgari box.” It isn’t clear whether Cohn himself ever discovered they were knockoffs. But when Peter Fraser, Cohn’s lover for the last years of the lawyer’s life, eventually had them appraised, he learned they were fakes. (Charlie Sheen has said that he too received a gift of supposedly diamond and platinum cuff links from Trump that ended up being worthless.)
Sherman explains that he and Strong crafted the cuff link gifting as “a final moment of betrayal that really would signify how Donald just didn’t give a shit about Roy at the very end. We added that pretty late, shortly before we started shooting the movie.”
“Roy was one of the worst people that ever lived,” says Sherman. “And if Donald could hurt him, what does that say about Donald?”
About 30 years after Cohn’s sad visit to Mar-a-Lago—shortly before Trump took office as president—he reminisced about his mentor’s trip to the resort. But he wasn’t remembering his time with Cohn, or their conversations. According to Joe Palazzolo and Michael Rothfeld’s 2020 book The Fixers, Trump recalled that after Cohn left, “I had to spend a fortune to fumigate all the dishes and silverware.” That detail made it into The Apprentice script too.
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