What You Need to Know About Donald Trump's Biopic 'The Apprentice' that Shocked Cannes

Donald Trump is not limited to campaign rallies and courtrooms anymore. He's reached the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. A biographical drama based on the former President, called The Apprentice, premiered at the 77th edition of the Festival de Cannes and received an 8-minute standing ovation, along with a warning from the movie's director, Ali Abbasi, about the Republican's second term. 

Directed by Abbasi and written by Gabriel Sherman, the movie documented Trump's extraordinary journey to unprecedented fame as a renowned New York businessman. In the 1980s, under the influence of his attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), Trump became a face among the American elites for his exuberant personality and business acumen, which is a focal point of the movie's plot. 

Abbasi's account of the politician's larger-than-life image took the Cannes festival by storm. However, it was still a risk to showcase the film in the current political climate, which is highly volatile ahead of the 2024 US elections in November. So, when after the credits rolled, the director himself clarified what prompted him to tell his story in the present circumstances. 

"There is no nice metaphorical way to deal with the rising wave of fascism; There's only the messy way," addressed Abbasi to a larger crowd at Cannes, as per The Hollywood Reporter. There's only the banal way. There's only the way of dealing with this wave on its own terms, at its own level and it's not going to be pretty, but I think the problem with the world is that the good people have been quiet for too long. So, I think it's time to make movies relevant. It's time to make movies political again." 

The film, which still doesn't have a US distributor, attracted gasps, applause, and all kinds of reactions from the audiences, including standing ovations for the star cast. After the screening, the Iranian-Danish director took his lead actors in a warm embrace. Succession star Strong co-stars as Cohn, Sebastian Stan as Trump, along with Martin Donovan (Tenet) as Fred Trump Sr. and Oscar and Golden Globe nominee Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump. 

The film hasn't been seen by anyone yet because it only wrapped up the filming process days before the premiere, but reports indicate that the Cannes crowd was left shocked by some moments in The Apprentice. A particular scene depicted Trump's alleged sexual assault of his first wife, Ivana, and a surgery room account of the ex-president getting liposuction. 

However, apart from highlighting some so-called personal details of Donald's life, Abbasi took the opportunity to warn the audience of the 'worst times' to follow in America. In a video post, the director said, "The Iranian president died. The Israeli prime minister is being indicted in the international court. There's a war in Ukraine. There's a war in Sudan. There's all sorts of s— going on." He cautioned, "But the storm is not going to get away. The storm is coming, actually. The worst times are to come."

Predictably, only hours after the film debuted at Cannes, Trump's campaign declared its plans to drag the entire film's production to the court for defamation. "We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers," the 77-year-old's spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said in a statement provided to Rolling Stone.