No one would talk to Sebastian Stan about his Donald Trump movie for ‘Actors on Actors’: ‘They were too afraid’

• Sebastian Stan plays a young Donald Trump in “The Apprentice,” a movie about his life in the 1970s.
• Stan said other actors wouldn’t discuss Trump, and the film, with him for Variety’s “Actors on Actors.”
• Trump slammed the film and sent a cease-and-desist to the filmmakers after its Cannes premiere.

You won’t see Sebastian Stan doing an “Actors on Actors” interview about his new Donald Trump movie “The Apprentice,” because, according to the actor, no one would talk to him about it.

Stan plays Trump in the new Ali Abbasi film, which was released in October. It follows the president’s ascendance into real-estate fame in the 1970s and 1980s and features other familiar faces like lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and Trump’s first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova). It’s not a particularly flattering portrayal, and Trump has made his disapproval of the film clear through social media posts and a cease-and-desist letter to Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman.

At a post-screening Q&A on Tuesday, which was recorded and uploaded to X (formerly Twitter), Stan said that he wasn’t able to participate in Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series because other actors’ teams were hesitant to allow them to speak about Trump.

“I had an offer to do Variety ‘Actor on Actor’ this Friday, and I couldn’t find another actor to do it with me because they were too afraid to go and talk about this movie, so I couldn’t do it,” Stan said.

“And it doesn’t matter, that’s OK, that’s not to point a finger at anybody,” he continued. “We couldn’t get past the publicists or the people representing them, because it was too afraid to talk about this movie.”

Variety co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh told IndieWire in a statement that Stan’s remarks were “accurate.”

“We invited him to participate in ‘Actors on Actors,’ the biggest franchise of awards season, but other actors didn’t want to pair with him because they didn’t want to talk about Donald Trump,” Setoodeh said.

Representatives for Sebastian Stan and Penske Media Corporation, which owns Variety, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This isn’t the first roadblock that “The Apprentice” has experienced when it comes to promotion and distribution.

After the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Abbasi and Sherman received the cease-and-desist from Trump’s team, and it went public shortly after. The film struggled to find a distributor until Briarcliff Entertainment picked it up and set an October premiere date just weeks before the United States election.

Before Trump won that election, and shortly after the film’s release, he called the movie “FAKE and CLASSLESS” in a post on his social-media company Truth Social. He said it was “put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country.”

Stan said during Tuesday’s Q&A that he had received plenty of “love” from others in the industry about the movie, but he thought that it was still important to continue speaking about Trump.

“That’s when I think we lose the situation, because if it really becomes that fear or that discomfort to talk about this, then we’re really going to have a problem,” he said.