Jeremy Strong on why playing Roy Cohn in ‘The Apprentice’ was ‘the greatest chance I’ve ever been given’
Jeremy Strong isn’t one to shy away from controversial characters. In Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice, the actor steps into the role of Roy Cohn, a lawyer and political hitman who has been dubbed “one of the worst human beings of the 20th century.”
Following the prosecutor’s controversial post as Sen. John McCarthy‘s chief counsel, Cohn began a 30-year career as a prominent New York attorney. On multiple occasions he was charged with professional misconduct and witness tampering. It was during this time he met a young Donald Trump, whom Cohn took under his wing, inspiring The Apprentice, which earned both Strong and Sebastian Stan (who plays Trump) Golden Globe nominations. Today Strong was nominated for a SAG Award as well.
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The awards recognition “felt great,” Strong tells Gold Derby (watch the full interview above). “It’s been a real uphill battle to find any traction for this movie. The movie couldn’t find distribution. People were afraid to touch the movie. People have been hesitant to engage with the movie because of the political charge. But the thing that I love about the movie and the reason that I did the movie is purely in a creative column. It’s a character study, and Ali Abbasi is a really. … It’s an overused term, but he’s a visionary.”
Despite the actor’s admiration for Abassi, he was still hesitant to play Cohn. “My trepidation in taking on the role was not because I thought he was a vile, monstrous person,” admits Strong, who rose to fame in the Emmy- and Globe-winning role of Kendall Roy in Succession. “I think that Iago and Richard III are vile and monstrous, but as an actor, I’m interested in those characters and in getting under their skin and figuring out what is the internal engine that makes them go. My hesitancy in taking on Roy was because there have been some documentaries about him that are incredible, that if you’re going to do it, you have to transcend something just mimetic and caricature. You have to, in a way, do something with a level of documentary realism almost. It has to have that level, for me, of precision and exactitude and emotional veracity.
“For me, the holy grail as an actor has always been the kind of transformational, chameleonic work that certain actors have done that I’ve always aspired to do, and this was really part and parcel the greatest chance I’ve ever been given to do that,” he continues. “It’s the narrowest and most precarious limb to go out on creatively, which was exciting and scary.”
When asked about the physical transformation required for the role, Strong smiles briefly, admitting to regular visits to a tanning salon in Dumbo, N.Y. However, the transformation was beyond skin-deep. “The physical stuff is really key,” he reveals. “I had to lose a lot of weight. I had to transform myself physically, altering your appearance, changing your voice, all of that.”
“If you study it enough, relentlessly enough, until your face turns blue, and then you keep going, eventually, you internalize, and sort of by osmosis, you absorb all of those things, and they just come out of you without thinking about it,” he explains.
The Apprentice focuses on Cohn’s relationship with Trump, who at the the time was an aspiring real-estate mogul. “It really is this sort of dark chrysalis from the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s that formed Donald Trump’s worldview and ideology,” Strong says. “Roy Cohn’s kind of dictum, always attack, deny everything, never admit defeat, which is explored in the film. Those are rooted in historical record, and you can trace that relationship and see the sort of terrible fruit that it’s borne today. We, in a sense, are all living under Roy Cohn’s shadow, whether we realize it or not. We’re in Roy Cohn’s world now.”
Strong calls his collaboration with Stan “my favorite experience ever working with an actor,” even comparing his costar to Daniel Day-Lewis, whom Strong worked with in Lincoln. “We’re both incredibly immersive in the way we work,” he says.
I think we had to be for this. We both stayed in a pretty myopic level of focus, and it was like jazz. We just played off of each other. And I trusted him. He trusted me. I think his work in this movie is utterly fearless, and I think we both had to be as fearless as we possibly could.”
Calling the film a “platonic love story,” the actor explains, “I do think that Roy was a deeply lonely person who wanted to have something to offer and be esteemed, and I think young Donald Trump really esteemed him and looked up to him, and it was a symbiotic relationship. Of course, the apprentice then eclipsed the master. In that sense, it’s a Frankenstein story, which is what Ali did so brilliantly, and is kind of the magic trick of the film that you think Roy Cohn is the devil. And then as his power diminishes, Donald Trump supersedes him, and Cohn, for a single moment at the end of the film, at least I wanted to kind of build it this way, stares into the abyss of his own wasted life into, I should say, an infinite regret just for a moment before he dies.”
That empathy felt for Cohn in the film has drawn criticism from some viewers. “I think that’s a dangerous attitude to take,” Strong says. “A lot of the resistance to this movie has actually not been from the right, it’s been from liberals who don’t want to see these people as ‘humanized.’ … I don’t agree with just about anything Roy Cohn ever said or did, but I do find a lot to empathize with in him and to pity in him. I think his life is essentially a tragic life. It’s a tragedy of self-denial. He denied his own nature. He denied central aspects of his nature and he denied reality. He had a flagrant disregard for the truth. His early wounds were so bottomless, and his need to compensate for this hole in himself. We are meant to, as filmmakers and storytellers, hold a mirror up to nature and understand the human condition. If we’ve gotten to a time where we only want to understand the narrow part of the human condition that makes us feel good, then we’re really in trouble of not learning from history.”
One of the most difficult scenes to shoot was near the end of the film following Cohn’s HIV diagnosis. Near death, he confronts Trump on the street. “He actually detested vulnerability, and he spent his whole life building up this armature, this bellicose, tough, invincible, invulnerable self,” Strong explains. “And I didn’t buy it that, all of a sudden, he was like this vulnerable guy. If you read about that visit to Mar-a-Lago, which happened, Roy, who had HIV, was so sick and in so much pain, but he was so defiant that he refused to sit in a wheelchair. He stood the whole time. He was in denial to the very end.”
“So I felt like if there was going to be a moment of vulnerability and diminution, we had to really earn it, and I had to believe it,” he continues. “And somehow, we got there. I guess it was a heartbreak. There was a kind of cleft in his heart, because he loved Donald. In life, they talked on the phone like 20 times a day for a decade. And then when Roy got sick and he started to lose his power and his pride of place, Trump essentially discarded him and treated him like a pariah, and I think it broke Roy’s heart.”
Strong quotes a line from Richard III, “And I no friends to back my suit at all, but the plain devil and dissembling looks. All the world to nothing.” He says, “To me, that’s Roy Cohn. All the world to nothing. And in a very frightening way, that’s also the view of his apprentice.”
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