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How a Rape Scene Blew Up the Trump Movie
“Part of me is like, Sue us,” says the Apprentice director. “The other part is like, This can ruin my life.”
The $16 million independently financed feature fiercely divided critics on the Croisette — the Times of London hailed it as “ full of compassionate feeling yet ruthless in analysis,” while Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri complained the movie “ gets dumber as it goes along ” — and drew “ audible gasps ” from premiere attendees for a scene in which Trump (played by Sebastian Stan) throws his wife Ivana (Oscar nominee Maria Bakalova) to the ground and rapes her. An ’80s-set coming-of-age story, it chronicles Trump’s mentor-protégé relationship with notorious legal fixer Roy Cohn(portrayed with zombie-eyed fury by Succession ’s Jeremy Strong), the Machiavellian McCarthyite who transformed the Donald from a doofus developer into a real-estate mogul–cum–tabloid mainstay whose best-selling The Art of the Deal made him the face of American business sang froid. Baer, who managed a small development fund, bought the script in an effort to “process what just happened” election-wise as well as to “understand culturally what Trump represented that so many people voted for.” In 2018, she began courting Abbasi for the project, convinced a director not from the U.S. could bring much-needed “outsider” perspective to a uniquely American political predicament.
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