Sebastian Stan Says He Canceled on Variety’s ‘Actors on Actors’ Because Others ‘Were Too Afraid’ to Discuss Trump, ‘The Apprentice’

Sebastian Stan was unable to participate in Variety’s “Actors on Actors” because he wasn’t able to find another actor willing to potentially speak about his Donald Trump biopic, “The Apprentice,” he told attendees at the film’s screening in Los Angeles. “I couldn’t find another actor to do it with me, because they were too afraid to to go and talk about this movie. So I couldn’t do it,” he explained.

Stan emphasized that he shared the anecdote “not to point a finger at anybody,” he continued. “You know, I’ve got to do a lot of great things, and that’s not pointing at anyone specific. It was… we couldn’t get past the publicists or the people representing them, because [they were] too afraid to talk about this movie.”

“And it’s like, that’s when I think we lose the situation,” Stan continued. “Because if it really becomes like that — fear or that discomfort to talk about this — then we’re really going to have a problem.”

Stan referenced an op-ed by Carlos Lozada published in the New York Times on Nov. 6. In “Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are,” Lozada wrote, “There have been so many attempts to explain away Trump’s hold on the nation’s politics and cultural imagination, to reinterpret him as aberrant and temporary.”

“‘Normalizing’ Trump became an affront to good taste, to norms, to the American experiment,” Lozada added. “We can now let go of such illusions. Trump is very much part of who we are. Nearly 63 million Americans voted for him in 2016. Seventy-four million did in 2020. And now, once again, enough voters in enough places have cast their lot with him to return him to the White House. Trump is no fluke, and Trumpism is no fad.”

For many, the idea that Trump is the same as any one of us is “a really difficult thing to deal with at the moment,” Stan continued, “and I understand the emotions are very high, but I think that’s the only way you’re going to grasp this film.”

“If all it’s saying is you cannot keep casting this person aside, especially after they get the popular vote, should we not give this a closer look and try to understand what it is about this person that’s even driving that?”

The film’s director Ali Abbasi defended “The Apprentice” as “very much fact-based and fact-checked.” He told TheWrap editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman at TheWrap’s 2024 TIFF Studio sponsored by Moët & Chandon and Boss Design, “It’s a story of how young Donald Trump was formed with the help of his mentor, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), and how he sort of started to become the person we now know.”

“But it’s also a story of a system, the depiction of the American system, the legal system, the inherent corruption in a system that allowed people like Roy Cohn to navigate freely and sort of pull the levers of power as they see fit,” Abbasi added.

You can watch the video from the LA screening of “The Apprentice” in the video above.