Jeremy Strong’s uphill awards season battle for The Apprentice

Forgive Jeremy Strong if he’s feeling like he and his The Apprentice cohorts are stuck in an extended Twilight Zone episode. While Amazon/MGM is nowhere on the next 007, they’ve locked Melania Trump into a lucrative documentary theatrical/streaming film deal, part of Jeff Bezos’ warm embrace of incoming US President Donald Trump. Trump was long a pariah to Hollywood, but that description is a better fit for how Hollywood has treated The Apprentice, the Ali Abbasi-directed origin story of Trump’s rise under the reptilian wing of Roy Cohn. Amazon and every other film distributor but Briarcliff’s Tom Ortenberg deemed it toxic, either because the corporations behind the distributors feared the repercussions if Trump got elected, while indie distributors feared Trump legal threats that never materialized.

That means that Sebastian Stan — a ’70s version of Trump as an aspiring real estate titan desperate to get out from under dad’s thumb, and Jeremy Strong — the ruthless lawyer Roy Cohn at the peak of his powers teaching the young apprentice to win using every nasty trick — have seen their superb performances get noticed far less than they deserved to in the US because of a lack of marketing money. The global-facing Golden Globes still nominated each actor, but in the continuing surreal nature of things, Sunday night’s Globes saw : Stan win, but for another movie; a Globe go to Jeremy Allen White, who is right now co-starring with Strong as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere; and then Strong was upended by his former Succession co-star Kieran Culkin in the Supporting Actor category. That left Strong’s most indelible Globes moment being the green velvet Loro Piana suit and bucket hat he wore in a seat much further back in the Beverly Hilton ballroom than when he was winning Globes for Succession. With Oscar nominations just ahead, is there room for Strong in the role of his career so far? We caught up over the New Year holiday to consider that.

DEADLINE: You followed The Apprentice with another mentor plunge, this time as Jon Landau in the Scott Cooper-directed film about Bruce Springsteen’s existential crisis making the Nebraska album. As a rabid fan of The Boss, I always felt grateful for Landau, the manager and producer who brought Springsteen out of a lot of personal and professional darkness. What has it been like, playing a laudable mentor?   

JEREMY STRONG: It’s honestly been one of the greatest working experiences I’ve ever had. He has a lot to do with who Bruce is, his spirit and the kind of concentric, uplifting circles that emanate from the core of his being. I like to do a deep dive playing these characters, and I’ve had a lot of access in this case to them. Bruce and Jon really opened the kimono to Jeremy and me. The more I’ve learned about them and witnessed them together, it really is a love story in a sense between these two men. Jon has been so instrumental in helping to guide Bruce, coming into his life at a moment where Bruce was really at a crossroads. Jon offered a steady hand that helped Bruce over the years. Not that Bruce needs any help; he’s a complete artist and a whole person, but help translates to engendering and coaxing out his vision. But honestly, man, if you’re a Bruce person as I am now more than ever, just being in the orbit and telling the story about Nebraska…it’s really a story about artistic authenticity in an increasingly synthetic world.

DEADLINE: Landau, once a critic who wrote the famous line about seeing the future of rock n roll in Springsteen, supplanted Springsteen’s original manager Mike Appel during the recording of Born to Run. The lawsuit put Springsteen on the shelf for awhile and the pent up anger fueled my favorite of his albums, Darkness On The Edge Of Town. It seems remarkable Springsteen was able to trust another manager again.  

STRONG: Greatness often comes from moments of crisis. Emerson said every wall is a door. I think certain people are able to, when they come up against the wall, find the opening. Bruce was barred from recording, specifically with Jon Landau, until finally the lawsuit was wrapped up. I’m on a vacation with friends, but this is the first moment I’m not actively in Jon’s voice, just to talk to you. But in a way, it’s like a mirror of The Apprentice, another story about mentorship. Jon was a kind and loving mentor that offered the guidance and clarity and equanimity that I think Bruce needed at that moment in his life. I’ve been witness to their relationship now for the past seven months that I’ve been preparing for this. It’s just been a beautiful thing to see and to have them on set, capturing it with them and weaving together the tapestry. Bruce and Jon will feed me stories, anecdotes, memories, thoughts, feelings that have all made their way into the film that we’re making. I’ve brought them into the scenes and Scott Cooper is such an incredible collaborative director, he welcomed it. I’ll be done this week, but you can see I’m wearing my Stone Pony baseball cap.

DEADLINE: Funny you mention Springsteen’s Jersey Shore haunt The Stone Pony. His early music was fueled by his difficult relationship with a factory worker father whose depression and fearfulness was exacerbated by being unable to figure out what his free spirited long-haired son with the guitar was headed for a dead end. For many young men like me, who had challenging relationships with fathers, his lyrics shone like a lighthouse in the dense fog. So when I got a tip that Springsteen might play show up at The Stone Pony where Clarence Clemons played with his band The Red Bank Rockers, my best friend and I drove hours. Sure enough, at 2 AM or so, when we figured it was a bum steer, out comes the muscled version of Springsteen we got to know during the Born in the USA tour. They played two hours of Motown songs. A bucket list night, let me tell you.

STRONG: What you’re talking about with his music is the way that certain destructive behavior and trauma, which we all have, can freeze us and make us numb. We all have that to a degree, and I think art can thaw those frozen parts of ourselves. It’s like taking an ice pick to a big block of ice that we can’t melt ourselves. That’s the healing power of certain art and certainly of his music. I had one of those moments. He played a surprise set at The Stone Pony a couple of months ago and he told me he was going to do it. I got in the car and drove down there. As an actor, you get to sometimes visit these worlds that you would otherwise never know, and that night was just one part of an extraordinarily special tourist visa, to go into that world. Especially coming out of the one that I was in, which was a journey into the heart of darkness.

DEADLINE: There are good mentors and bad. I’ve seen the phrase Faustian bargain said about Trump hitching his wagon to Cohn. Coming out the other side of that film, is Faustian Bargain too simplistic in defining Cohn and Trump? To his dying day, Cohn denied he had AIDS or that he was gay. He took patriotic pride in spearheading the communist witch hunt that caused the Hollywood blacklist, and in executing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for treason, even though she was the mother of young children. He’s a Citizen Kane. What’s your assessment?  

COHN: I agree with everything you just said. He stands alone. He’s been called one of the worst human beings of the 20th century. It’s hard to put my thumb on a kind of single descriptive term because he’s such a paradox. That made it such a rich dramatic character to play, that he’s not just one thing. Ivy Meeropol, who’s the granddaughter of Ethel Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg, made a documentary called Bully Coward Victim, the words written about Cohn on the AIDS quilt. Those three words are an amazing summation of him. Not a victim in terms of exonerating him from all of the harm and incalculable damage that he caused because he had agency. He’s not a victim in that sense. I spent a lot of time learning about him, which you do to try and find your way into a character and what drives them. And I can’t think about Roy without thinking about a few things. One was that he was alive and practicing law at the highest level, at a time where you couldn’t be an openly gay person.

So this fundamental part of his nature was untenable, and he had to destroy it and stamp it out in himself. I think that created a schism inside of him, a wound that was filled up with a kind of destructive nihilism. He decided, fu*k the world, because of the way it treated him, because of the way when he was a child and when he was a young person, the world mirrored back to him that he was unacceptable and monstrous. He resolved, I’m never going to feel less than, or powerless or un-special ever again.

He sought clout in a very ruthless and unapologetic way, which is  different than power. Clout is a defining virtue for Roy and for Donald Trump because you have this belief, and it’s borne out. It turns out in our society that if you have enough clout, well, as Roy Cohn said, this is a nation of men, not laws. If you know people and you can pull the levers of power, you can essentially make the world in your own image. That’s what he wanted to do, and what he did, to an extent, in all he taught Donald Trump. It would be an incomplete thing to say that Roy Cohn was just this ruthless, vicious Machiavellian figure. I hate to say it, but it is true, he also had tenderness and charm, and a capacious intellect. To juries and when he was indicted by Robert Morgaethau for the third time, he’d recite a poem called Byron, by Joaquin Miller. The poem goes: In men whom men condemn as ill/I find so much of goodness still/ In men whom men pronounce divine/I find so much of sin and blot/I do not dare to draw a line/between the two, where God has not.

To me, it’s an almost humanistic perspective. He’s basically saying, I’m not a hypocrite. You guys are all hypocrites. Everyone contains some light and some darkness. And part of his superpower, and inarguably that of Donald Trump, is a shameless ability to be himself. His favorite song was from La Cage Aux Folles, it was I Am What I Am. We tried to get it in the movie, but the estate wouldn’t give us the rights. Play that song and if it doesn’t explain Roy Cohn and to an extent Donald Trump, I don’t know what would.

DEADLINE: You’ve played a lot of characters based on real people. What was most helpful that you found on Cohn that helped you immerse yourself in him so deeply?

STRONG: I’ve done that in The Big Short, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, Selma, and I played Oswald in Parkland. It’s a gift when you have a lot of source material to devour and really attack all of it and try and master it and internalize it. It sets up an equation where, if you do this, then you can do that.

DEADLINE: What does that mean?

STRONG: Something much more mysterious than just…that. You have to absorb and learn everything and study them endlessly. And at a certain point, something just takes over, takes possession of you. You don’t know how that’s going to happen. And every time…I’ve been doing this my whole life, but every time I start a job, I feel like I’m starting from nowhere, that that I know nothing. I feel that I don’t know if I can do this. I guess in a way, that’s the thing that feels dangerous and exciting. I was prepared to say no to this role because of the anxiety of influence, because Al [Pacino] had done it [in Angels In America] and others had done it so brilliantly. But I saw Al a couple weeks ago, we had a little screening of The Apprentice and he was there and he used a Browning quote he wrote about in his book. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for. I think that’s the whole criterion of doing anything. It should be outside your grasp.

When I look at the kind of transformational work based on historical characters that I feel inspired by, from Ben Kingsley in Gandhi, or Phil Hoffman in Capote or what I witnessed Daniel Day-Lewis do in Lincoln, it’s about transcending impersonation and finding the essence in a deep, serious way. It’s funny. Lately, people have felt a need to take shots at me or say disparaging things, which I don’t really think there’s any need for.

DEADLINE: What kind of potshots?

STRONG: The way I approach things, my process. I feel we’re storytellers. I think about those performances I just mentioned. Those are actors telling story through character, which to me is the highest bar. That’s the holy grail for me, creating a character, which is sort of creating an instrument that’s never existed before. And then learning how to play it with fluency and mastery. Shakespeare said that actors are the brief and abstract chroniclers of the time. That’s the task I feel most excited by. A lot of it is application of technique. You have to change. Shakespeare, said you can almost change the stamp of your nature, if you do something enough for long enough with enough concentration and will. That’s the kind of acting that I love. And it does require a kind of, I don’t know, devil may care attitude towards what anybody might think of what you’re doing. And that was the case for both Sebastian [Stan] and I. I think Sebastian is just brilliant in The Apprentice.

To do what he did requires a boldness; it required whatever amount of fearlessness I could muster as an actor. And do I feel satisfied with it? Is it painful for me to watch? Yeah, it’s always painful for me to watch these things, but I know that I went for it. And at a certain point in my life, my goal stopped being to succeed or even to do great work. The goal is to become as free as possible in the creative work that I do, less about the result than going as far as you can and finding that frontier every time. And perhaps the thing about your reach exceeding your grasp, going beyond that frontier and kind of breaking your own sound barrier. And with The Apprentice, I had never felt I had done that before in quite the way that this film required, in terms of character study, but also finding a humanity in a possibly unredeemable person.

DEADLINE: Why would the process of doing that warrant taking shots?

STRONG: I brought that up just because it’s been on my mind, and I guess I feel like it’s connected to the movie in a certain way. Because we’re living in Roy Cohn’s world now, one he prepared the ground for, planting these malignant seeds that have now borne terrible fruit. I think there’s this sort of Trumpism in our culture now where, and the media is partly responsible for it to be honest, where meanness travels. And to me, it’s anti-art and not worthy of the dignity of what we’re all trying to do. I think about Roy, how delighted he would be with the muckraking and the stone throwing going on in our country right now.

DEADLINE: Messaging gaining more power than actual truth?

STRONG: Exactly. Truth was a plaything to Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn’s relationship to truth is like Alex Jones’ relationship to truth. There’s that incredible documentary where he’s being confronted by one of the parents from Sandy Hook. They’re on the stand, looking him in the eyes and telling him about what happened to them. And he’s just saying whatever is coming into his head, with conviction, used to getting away with it. But in this instance, he’s in a court of law and the judge admonishes him and says, what you believe is true and what is true are two different things. Do you understand that? For someone like Cohn, I don’t know that they understand that because truth is malleable and that’s a very dangerous thing.

DEADLINE: The Apprentice got an eight-minute standing ovation at Cannes. Did you walk out thinking this movie was going to be a big sales title and a major release in the heat of the Presidential election?  

STRONG: There was a feeling of excitement going into Cannes. I’d seen a cut of the film and then Trump sent the cease and desist, and tacitly threatened repercussions for anyone who was going to get involved with this movie. And then it was crickets. Before Cannes was over, the film was untouchable. And then the months of protracted legal negotiations with the then-financiers. For most of the summer, I was told the movie’s never going to come out. It might come out in Europe and other territories, but it’s not going to see the light of day in America. That felt tragic to me given that it was uniquely equipped to offer insight to the people in our country about an incumbent president and the power of a destructive ideology; teaching you really what that ideology is, that it’s not the words that we hear, but what’s underneath those words. That’s what Roy Cohn was teaching. We basically never came back from that. Tom Ortenberg had the balls and the courage to come and champion this movie. But I’ll tell you, Mike, it’s one of the things that’s been most challenging. I always was an idealist about all this stuff and thought that serious work and excellence was the metric. I learned a lot of the metric is about the horse trading and how big your coffers are.

DEADLINE: That has put you at disadvantage even now, when yours and Sebastian’s performances aren’t getting the love they deserve?

STRONG: This movie has had this handicap where they don’t have a dime. There’s been no…anything. So a lot of people still don’t really know about the movie. I feel so grateful to for having really put this movie out there to the community over the fall. But it’s strange that I’ve heard from Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, more than I’ve heard from anyone running any streaming services, or in the industry.

DEADLINE: How did Roger Stone and Steve Bannon grade the film?

STRONG: They reached out to our screenwriter Gabe Sherman because he’s covered them and they praised the work. It was gratifying given that they knew Roy but a little terrifying given that this film represents what is to me a living danger. But I do feel each time we’ve had these screenings…a lot of people raise their hand and they say, I wish everyone in the country had been able to see this movie. And my answer is always, you and me both. Not that it necessarily would’ve moved the needle. What’s been interesting is the resistance to the movie has come more from the left than it has from the right.

People in our own industries, I think maybe there is nausea at humanizing these people. But Sebastian and Ali [Abassi] and Gabe and Maria [Bakalova] and me and Martin [Donovan], we only know how to approach these things one way. I hate to break it to you but these people are human beings, and if we don’t learn about them, then we’re just fu*ked because we’ve seen what happens when we don’t bother trying to learn and understand. This film my work on this character is an attempt to understand someone like Roy Cohn, his kind of arrested development and rage. I thought about this during Succession, this idea that behind every institution is the shadow of a man. And I really feel that in 2025, we’re now living in Roy Cohn’s shadow. I think that’s how important and central he is. And most people don’t know anything about him or even know that he existed.

DEADLINE: All over town, the corporations behind studios seem to be giving Trump a warm embrace, donating to his inauguration. Last time, I think he had a couple of American Idol runners-up singing. This time who knows? He’s suddenly very popular.  

STRONG: Let’s take it further. He’s been a pariah and without naming names, a lot of those heads of places have made trips to Mar-a-Lago, and I find that disconcerting. But politics aside, what I find disconcerting is what it bodes for our storytelling. If we are going to move increasingly towards low hanging fruit, low risk stories that don’t touch the third rail or offend anyone, everything getting safer and more hollowed out, then I would find that to be the most troubling thing

DEADLINE: I re-watched the ending of Succession and your character sitting on that bench in front of the chilly East River, forever losing the crown he believed his father owed him, and we didn’t know if he was going to pitch himself in the water. You gave seven years to Kendall Roy, and given how much you threw yourself into that character, I wondered what Jeremy Strong felt, realizing that the most celebrated HBO show since The Sopranos was over, and you would have to let go?

STRONG: Such a great question. If I’m honest, the answer is, nothing. For me, and the way I work, there is a kind of emptying out of yourself, so that ideally you can be a pure vessel to the writing and whatever arises in the moment. This sounds so highfalutin, but whatever. I’ve been going to some meditation retreats with this incredible teacher, Jon Kabat Zinn. He talks about no one moment being more important than any other moment, and I have come to really believe that. One of the keys to working as an actor in film and on stage is to be completely available to the moment without making too much of it. There’s nothing monumental about that moment in Kendall’s life. I mean, arguably it’s a big moment, but it’s part of a continuum of moments. So he’s sitting on a bench and I think, listen, I did want to go in that water. I thought it was all over for him. I felt it was over. My head is empty, but I’m full of feeling, I guess if I can describe it, I’m full of…I don’t know if the feelings are mine or theirs or whatever it is. It’s a strange alchemy. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when you’re lucky, there’s a kind of merging that happens where these characters kind of just take over. They take you places that you don’t really understand. But all that to say, in the moment I never really monumentalized what Succession was, maybe because I was afraid to take it in. But also because as an artist, I felt like the best way for me to do this is just to keep my feet on the ground and to just be as honest as possible, one moment at a time. And sometimes you do that through theatrical characters;, when I’m doing an Ibsen play, I’m a vessel for Ibsen. Roy Cohn was as close to an Iago as I’ll probably ever play. I felt like I’d been sort of preparing my whole life to do something like that. And it’s been really meaningful that it’s been received at least by the people that I respect the most, the actors and filmmakers and people in this community, and the way you treated us when we saw you at Telluride. At the end of the day, that’s the stuff that matters. And I know we’re having a conversation in the context of this awards season, and of course everyone cares about it to an extent, and I do too. But it also feels like the work itself is the reward.

And the exchanges with people that if you feel like you got something across, that’s the reward. For me, the work, the reward really is getting to do these films and work with these filmmakers. It’s like, I can’t even believe this.

DEADLINE: Give an example of that validation.

STRONG: Robert Downey Jr. hosted a screening a few weeks ago and Al Pacino was there here. I had a realization that when I was a kid, my dad brought me out to LA for six weeks to audition for pilots. I didn’t come from money and my family had nothing to do with any of this. Mom and dad both had to work overtime and extra jobs to save up money for us to come. My dad worked as a security guard overnight. We go stay at the Oakwood Apartments on Barham Boulevard, knowing everyone I know now stayed there at some point. While we were there, the Academy Awards were happening, and I begged my dad to take me down there and watch from the bleachers. I just thought it was the most exciting thing in the world. I was, 12 or 13, and it was the year Robert was nominated for Chaplin and Al was nominated for Scent Of A Woman.

I slept overnight on the bleachers with my dad, and it was freezing cold. I don’t think I fell asleep at all because it was just indescribably exciting to be there. I remember watching these people who were larger than life to me, walk on the carpet. And a couple weeks ago I was with the two of them, thinking how incredible life is and just what this journey has been. It brought me back to that moment…the way I felt on those bleachers that night. My poor dad shivering, because he gave me his jacket to keep me warm. I still feel that way when I drive onto a lot or when I go to set. I feel it’s just crazy to me that I get to do this with my life and I don’t take any of it for granted. So that’s also part of why I want to give it so much. I don’t know any other way of doing it. I want to give it everything.