Sebastian Stan finds President Donald Trump’s behavior to be no laughing matter.
“I think we’re in a really, really bad place. I really do,” Stan, 43, told reporters during a press conference for his new movie Fjord on Monday, May 18. “To be honest with you, when you’re looking at what’s happening, right — if we’re talking about the consolidation of the media, censorship, threats, the supposed lawsuits that seemingly never end but don’t actually go anywhere — the writing was on the wall. We encountered all that with the movie.”
Although it’s been two years since he played Trump, 79, in the biopic The Apprentice, Stan still remembers the lengths the president of the United States went to try and stop the film from coming out.
“Three days before the festival, [we were] unsure if the movie was going to play the festival,” he said via Variety. “So maybe people are paying attention more to that film, I think it will stand the test of time for that. But we went through all of it, right before Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert and so on. So, I wish it wasn’t like that.”
While Trump has previously called for Kimmel’s firing for his controversial jokes, he also celebrated the cancellation of The Late Show, saying Colbert’s “talent was even less than his ratings.”
Stan himself knows what it’s like to have Trump call out his work and projects.
In October 2024, the president took to his Truth Social account and slammed The Apprentice, a movie that centers on his rise as a real estate businessman in New York City under the mentorship of Roy Cohn.
“A FAKE and CLASSLESS Movie written about me, called, ‘The Apprentice’ (Do they even have the right to use that name without approval?), will hopefully ‘bomb,’” Trump wrote at the time. “It’s a cheap, defamatory and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country, ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!’”
Stan was able to put any drama with the president in the past as he celebrated the premiere of his latest movie, Fjord.
The drama, which received a 10-minute standing ovation, tells the story of an immigrant Romanian family living in Norway, who is subject to an investigation and faces the scrutiny of the local judicial system.
“There’s always this fine line as an actor of, what is my responsibility and is there a duty to uphold this mirror to the world as we see it?” Stan shared with Deadline when discussing the film. “All we can do is through storytelling, do our part to represent in any way we can, as truthfully as we can, the complexities that we are all dealing with.”
