Lifestyle
'Deny, deflect, delay': Jeremy Strong channels Trump's mentor in 'The Apprentice'
Jeremy Strong, left, plays attorney Roy Cohn and Sebastian Stan is a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice.
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Apprentice Productions Ontario Inc.
With less than a month until the presidential election, Jeremy Strong’s new movie, The Apprentice, is causing a stir. The film centers on a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) as he’s trying to establish himself in his father’s business as a real estate developer. Strong plays Roy Cohn, Trump’s attorney and mentor.
In May, Trump’s attorneys sent a cease and desist letter, trying to block the film’s U.S. release. The Apprentice opens Friday.
“No one would touch this movie. The studios were afraid to touch it. The streamers were afraid to touch it,” Strong says. “They were afraid of litigation. And they were afraid of repercussions from a possible Trump administration.”
In a statement to the Associated Press, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said that the Trump team will file a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”
Strong notes that the move to block the movie seems straight out of Cohn’s playbook: “Deny, deflect, delay. … If you do that vociferously and loudly enough, you will make it so.”
In 1954, Cohn served as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Senate investigations into Communist influence in the U.S. government. Cohn and McCarthy also collaborated on an executive order banning gay people from serving in the federal government. Cohn died in 1986 shortly after being disbarred.
Strong is no stranger to difficult or unlikable characters. He won an Emmy for his portrayal of Kendall Roy in Succession, and he also played Lee Harvey Oswald in Parkland. He says he prepared for The Apprentice by reading Cohn’s writings and by leaving his judgment behind.
“You have to really check that at the door as an actor,” he says. “It’s an empathic practice. … I’m simply trying to inhabit him in a fully dimensional way.”
Interview highlights
On the responsibility of playing a real person in The Apprentice
If there’s any improvisation, the improvisation is drawn, usually in my case, from historical record. So, for example, Roy wrote a number of books … and there are sort of wonderful turns of phrase that Roy would use, things like “dead duck” or “phony as a $3 bill,” things that I put into the movie, … just these little granular details that helped give dimension and weight, but also accuracy. … I absolutely feel a sort of fidelity to truth with a capital “T,” which is funny in this case because Roy Cohn, if he’s anything to me, he’s like the progenitor of alternative facts. He’s not someone who really espoused truth with a capital “T.” He thought truth was a plaything that you could do as you wish with it.
On an improvised take of the last scene of the Succession, where he climbed the barrier to the river side, insinuating that Kendall attempts suicide
Strong says his Succession character Kendall Roy had lost everything by the show’s final episode.
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You, I think, learn over a lifetime to obey your deepest instincts. It’s that thing of, better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission. I find that I generally don’t believe in asking permission because, especially now, there’s so many layers of risk averse, safety-oriented [production staff], and these things are all important, but I was obeying a deep impulse.
My feeling and strong conviction was and is — but it’s Jesse [Armstrong]’s show at the end of the day — that this was an extinction-level event for Kendall and that there was no coming back from it. … And at this point, he had lost everything. He had lost his father. He had lost his siblings. He had lost his ex-wife. He had lost his children. He’d lost his putative reason for being. And also, remember, he was an addict. So I just did not believe that he was coming back from that. … The moment I think that Jesse chose is extremely powerful and he’s sort of frozen in a kind of inner scream. And I love that he chose that.
On Kendall’s infamous rap, “L to the OG,” performed at a dinner celebrating his father’s 50th year in the company on Succession
Nick Britell, who’s the composer, called me up … and he said, “Hey, I have this rap. Maybe you could do it at the dinner?” We were filming it three days later, and he played it for me on the phone and I have a recording of it in my voice notes, and it was roughly what it became. I made up the chorus for it and made up the melody for it and made it up in the car as we were driving from Glasgow to Dundee. And it’s just a pretty ad-hoc thing in the making of it. You’re just kind of throwing something together and you’re dancing as fast as you can. And I asked the costume designer, I sketched out a jersey that I thought I could wear, and they made it for me and had it three days later. …
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I didn’t want anyone to hear it until the first take. So one thing I love about that scene is the look on Kieran [Culkin] and Sarah [Snook] and everybody’s faces, which is just incredible … because they’ve never seen me do it until then.
On whether staying away from other actors on set helps him with his character
It’s not always been a popular answer, but if I’m honest, I would say yes. … [It’s about] taking a break from the social domain so that you can be in touch with yourself on a deeper level.
Kendall, as written, was someone who was going through a very deep level of existential agony and confronting crisis after crisis, including having the death of a person weighing on him. … I don’t take that lightly. And I feel that my job is to actually understand that and try and inhabit that so that when that character says, “I’m blown into a million pieces,” on the dirt floor of the parking lot at the end of Season 4, that I can mean those words. So I have to do whatever I have to do to earn that and arrive at that place. And that often doesn’t involve having a social bon ami with other actors. …
[But] you’re not doing this alone. It might sound like I’m saying you’re doing this alone, but I’m not saying that. … When you’re between “Action!” and “Cut!” it’s something you do together. I personally think that whatever anyone wants to do outside of “Action!” and “Cut!” is their own business. And different people approach this work in different ways and need different things to serve it to their fullest.
On memorizing lines
I’ve been learning plays since I was a little kid and I did theater for my whole life until about 10 years ago, and then I started doing more film and television. But even on Succession, you’re learning a 90- or 100-page script every 10 days. And I have to learn that upside down and left and right and if I was thrown out of a plane in the middle of a cyclone, I would still know it. That’s how well I have to know a text so that I can internalize it the way I feel that I need to. It’s a muscle. So maybe it’s just through habit and repetition … but I have to work very hard at it. Some people have a photographic memory or can just learn things very easily. But I’ve never been someone for whom anything comes particularly easy.
On how his parents’ work influenced him
My father worked in juvenile justice and ran these essentially jails for the Department of Youth Services. My mother was a hospice nurse. They were both sort of givers. They’re both empaths and I think really courageous people. …
I think they actually really shielded my brother and I from that and protected us from any of that heaviness or drama. … That had a huge effect on me, that they did something that really mattered to them. … I do think there was something about how central my parents’ work was to their lives and how much they gave of themselves to it that imprinted itself on me.
Roy siblings Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Shiv (Sarah Snook) comfort Kendall (Strong) as he makes a seismic confession in the Season 3 finale of Succession.
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On seeing acting as freedom from his own anxieties
I would also say that acting and the impulse to do this was initially an escape and wanting to escape from where I lived, from the heaviness that I felt, from the frayed, strained financial situation and struggles that my parents had. It’s a bit of a Houdini act, because you can enter into an imaginary world and be free of all of that. Be free of your circumstances and be free of yourself, because self, as we all I think know, can be a kind of prison. So acting is a liberative process, because you can just immediately be free from the prison of self and from your environment and circumstances.
On leaving his characters — even Kendall Roy — behind
I have a stack of scripts in my office and it’s like this stack of lives that I’ve had that when they’re over, they’re over, and you just put them away and I put it away because I have a life and children. … So I don’t feel more of a kinship with that role than I do with any other role that I’ve ever played, which might sound like a strange thing, because I know it’s the thing that I’ve become known most for … [and it was] a seven-year thing. One day maybe I’ll watch it all back and take in the magnitude of what it was. But I’ve probably had to protect myself from that because I don’t think that that would serve me, if that makes any sense. … I find that you do your work, you do it on the day, you give it everything, and then that’s it. Like, that’s all you need to be involved with. So whether it becomes the biggest thing in the world, whether they release a single, whether something wins the Academy Award, that’s not your concern. Your concern is to be all in when you’re doing it.
Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
You want to see some real fashion ingenuity? Watch the N.F.L. draft.
I’m not saying it’s all good, but where else are you going to see someone in a double-breasted suit made by a company better known for making yoga pants? Or an Abercrombie & Fitch suit jacket so short that it exposes the belt loops on the pants beneath?
On the whole, the style on display at the N.F.L. draft last night was very overeager senior formal: a lot of suits in colors beyond basic blue. The quarterback Ty Simpson wore a custom suit by the athleisure label Alo, which, I have to say, looked better than I would have envisioned had you said the words “Alo Yoga suit” to me.
I thought it might have been from Suitsupply, but the conspicuous “Alo” pin on his right lapel put that idea to rest. Simpson, smartly, unfastened that beacon before appearing onstage as the 13th pick to the Los Angeles Rams. He had, perhaps, satisfied his contractual obligations by that point.
Earlier in the evening, as the wide receiver Carnell Tate threw up his arms in exaltation after being picked fourth by the Tennessee Titans, his cropped Abercrombie & Fitch jacket revealed a swatch of rib cage. He looked like a mâitre d’ who had just hit the Mega Millions.
During the N.B.A.’s extended fashion awakening, its draft has become a sandbox for luxury brands to cozy up to would-be endorsers. The Frenchman Victor Wembanyama broke a kind of cashmere ceiling when he wore Louis Vuitton to go first overall in the 2023 N.B.A. draft.
The N.F.L. draft has none of that. The brands you see are often not brands at all, but custom tailors that reach the league’s neophytes through a whisper network among players. The draft is also a platform to raise the curtain on longer-term brand deals that better suit these rookies. We may, for instance, never see Simpson in a suit again. Nearly every photo from his time at Alabama shows him in a T-shirt or hoodie. It makes sense for him to sign with Alo.
Football is the most mainstream of American cultural entities. And it’s one that still hasn’t, in spite of the league’s best efforts, taken off overseas. Few players, save some quarterbacks and a tight end who happens to be engaged to a pop star, feel bigger than the game itself. If you’re a new-to-the-league linebacker, you’ll most likely never harness the star power to grab the attention of Armani, but you might have just the right pull for Abercrombie.
The N.F.L. draft is therefore one of the few red carpets where the brands worn by the athletes may also be worn by those watching at home. How many people watching the Oscars will ever own clothes from Louis Vuitton or Chanel? People may comment online about Lady Gaga wearing Matières Fécales to the Grammys, but how many of those fans and viewers could afford to buy clothes from it?
The Japanese designers changing fashion
Yesterday, I published a deep dive into how a newish crop of Japanese designers are soaking up all the attention in men’s fashion right now. This was a piece I was writing in my head long before I sat down and finally started typing. I remember sitting at a fashion show in Paris over a year ago — I believe it was Dior — and being asked by my seatmate if I’d made it over to a showroom in the Marais to check out A.Presse. That Tokyo-based brand is now part of a vanguard of Japanese labels that, on many days, seems to be all anyone in fashion wants to talk about. I spent months talking with designers, store owners and big-time shoppers to make sense of why these brands have kicked up so much buzz and, more than that, what makes their clothes so great. You can read the story here.
Other things worth knowing about:
Thirty years ago, comedian and actor Tig Notaro didn’t have a clear direction in life, so she followed some childhood friends who wanted to get into entertainment to Los Angeles. Secretly wanting to do stand-up, Notaro decided to try her luck at various outlets in town, which became the start of her successful career.
“I stayed on my friends’ couch near the Hollywood Improv on Melrose, and a couple months later, got my own studio apartment in the Miracle Mile area,” Notaro says. “I love all the options for everything in L.A. — the entertainment, the restaurants. I like to stay active. So many people love the hiking options in Los Angeles, and I’m one of them.”
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
Notaro appears in Season 3 of Apple TV’s “The Morning Show” and is a series regular on Paramount+’s “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” as she was on “Star Trek: Discovery.” She’s also a touring stand-up comic and hosts “Handsome,” a comedy podcast, with Fortune Feimster and Mae Martin. The trio will be taping a live show May 4 at the Wiltern with the cast of Netflix’s “The Hunting Wives.” The live shows include interviews, but also “incorporate some ridiculous things,” she says. For example, upon hearing that some of the hosts always wanted to learn to tap dance, Notaro “hired a tap instructor to come to our live show in Austin and teach us how to tap dance in front of the audience.”
Notaro lives near Hollywood with her wife, actor Stephanie Allynne, their 9-year-old fraternal twin boys, Max and Finn, and three cats, Fluff, Linus and Skip. When she’s not touring, her ideal Sundays include sampling vegan restaurants, wandering through bookstores or museums, and doing something physically active with the family.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
6 a.m.: Up with the kids
Because we have active children, we still wake up at 6 a.m. or 6:30 a.m. on Sunday, but there’s not as much of a rush to get going. Stephanie and I will often have coffee and chat in the living room together. I love that part of the day. Stephanie may cook breakfast, but Max and Finn are pretty self-sufficient and can make certain little meals for themselves. Max is really starting to take an interest in cooking, so he’d make breakfast for himself. Our family is vegan, but he eats eggs, so he makes himself an egg sandwich with avocado a lot of times.
9 a.m.: Daily morning walk
After breakfast, we usually have a morning walk around our neighborhood. That’s a daily thing I like to do, regardless of what’s going on. Now that I’m not touring as much, tennis is back on the schedule. So I’d go to Plummer Park in West Hollywood and play for a while, then join the family for lunch.
11:30 a.m.: Hike with a side of chickpea sandwich
I love Trails, a cafe in Griffith Park, where you can eat outdoors. It serves simple food, and has good vegan options. I usually get their chickpea salad sandwich. The food there is great. Afterward, we’d visit Griffith Observatory, where there’s lots to see. There are lots of great trails in the park, so we’d go for an hour hike before leaving.
3 p.m.: Browse the shelves for rock biographies
Bookstores are fun, so we’d head downtown for the Last Bookstore, which is in a historic building with lots of vintage books. I really love all things plant-based, and I’m a very big music fanatic. So I love to look for vegan books, nutrition books, rock biographies and autobiographies. It’s just fun to browse around the stacks.
If we didn’t go to the bookstore, we’d probably go to LACMA. Our sons are huge fans of art and want to go for each new exhibit. They love Hockney, Basquiat and Picasso, to name a few.
4 p.m.: Cuddle with cuties at a cat cafe
We’d then make a quick stop at [Crumbs & Whiskers], a kitten and cat cafe on Melrose for coffee, snacks and to pet the cats. It’s best to make reservations in advance. There’s cats all around the place that need to be adopted. You can visit and pet them, or find a new roommate. I’d love to take some home, but we already have three.
5:30 p.m. Italian or sushi, but make it vegan
We’re an early dinner family. One restaurant we like is Pura Vita in West Hollywood. It’s the greatest vegan Italian food, and for non-vegans, nobody ever knows the difference. It’s the first 100% plant-based Italian restaurant in the United States. They make an incredible kale salad and I love the San Gennaro pizza. It’s got cashew mozzarella, tomato sauce, Italian sausage crumble and more.
Then there’s Planta in Marina del Rey. It’s right on the harbor and you can sit outside and look at the boats coming in and out. They have sushi, salads and other plant-based entrees. They’ve got a really great spicy tuna roll that’s made out of watermelon. They are magicians.
Or there’s Crossroads Kitchen in West Hollywood. They play the best classic rock, and the atmosphere is upscale, fine dining. The appetizers that we always get are called Moroccan Cigars, which are vegan meat substitutes fried in a rolled batter. I really like the grilled lion’s mane steak, their mushroom steak with truffle potatoes, or the scallopini Milanese, that has a chicken or tofu option. I get the chicken with arugula on top. I always love to have a decaf espresso with dessert, which is either a brownie sundae or banana pudding.
7:30 p.m.: Comfort watch or word games
After dinner, the kids often like to watch an episode of “Friends,” a show that all ages enjoy, sports or “The Simpsons.” Or we’d play a game where each of us will add a word to a sentence and create a weird or funny long sentence until one of our sons says period. Then they’ll try and remember the whole sentence and repeat it back.
9:30 p.m.: Bubble bath then bed
The boys usually go to bed at 8:30 p.m. and bedtime for us is 9:30 p.m. Stephanie and I would read or chat. I like to take a bubble bath, if people must know. The best Sundays for me mean finding a good balance of relaxing and being active. I feel very lucky that my family and I can do those things together.
When Marian Sherry Lurio and Jonathan Buffington Nguyen met at a mutual friend’s wedding at Higgins Lake, Mich., in July 2022, both felt an immediate chemistry. As the evening progressed, they sat on the shore of the lake in Adirondack chairs under the stars, where they had their first kiss before joining others for a midnight plunge.
The two learned that the following weekend Ms. Lurio planned to attend a wedding in Philadelphia, where Mr. Nguyen lives, and before they had even exchanged numbers, they already had a first date on the books.
“I have a vivid memory of after we first met,” Mr. Nguyen said, “just feeling like I really better not screw this up.”
Before long, they were commuting between Philadelphia and New York City, where Ms. Lurio lives, spending weekends and the odd remote work days in one another’s apartments in Philadelphia and Manhattan. Within the first six months of dating, Mr. Nguyen joined Ms. Lurio’s family for Thanksgiving in Villanova, Pa., and, the following month, she met his family in Beavercreek, Ohio, at a surprise birthday party for Mr. Nguyen’s mother.
Ms. Lurio, 32, who grew up in Merion Station outside Philadelphia, works in investor relations administration at Flexpoint Ford, a private equity firm. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in history and psychology.
Mr. Nguyen, also 32, was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and raised in Beavercreek, Ohio, from the age of 7. He graduated from Haverford College with a bachelor’s degree in political science and is now a director at Doyle Real Estate Advisors in Philadelphia.
Their long-distance relationship continued for the next few years. There were dates in Manhattan, vacations and beach trips to the Jersey Shore. They attended sporting events and discovered their shared appreciation of the 2003 film, “Love Actually.”
One evening, Mr. Nguyen recalled looking around Ms. Lurio’s small New York studio — strewed with clothes and the takeout meal they had ordered — and feeling “so comfortable and safe.” “I knew that this was something different than just sort of a fling,” he said.
It was an open question when they would move in together. In 2024, Ms. Lurio began the process of moving into Mr. Nguyen’s home in Philadelphia — even bringing her cat, Scott — but her plans changed midway when an opportunity arose to expand her role with her current employer.
Mr. Nguyen was on board with her decision. “It almost feels like stolen valor to call it ‘long distance,’ because it’s so easy from Philadelphia to New York,” Mr. Nguyen said. “The joke is, it’s easier to get to Philly from New York than to get to some parts of Brooklyn from Manhattan, right?”
In January 2025, Mr. Nguyen visited Ms. Lurio in New York with more up his sleeve than spending the weekend. Together they had discussed marriage and bespoke rings, but when Mr. Nguyen left Ms. Lurio and an unfinished cheese plate at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel that Friday evening, she had no idea what was coming next.
“I remember texting Jonathan,” Ms. Lurio said, bewildered: “‘You didn’t go toward the bathroom!’” When a Lobby Bar server came and asked her to come outside, Ms. Lurio still didn’t realize what was happening until she was standing in the hallway, where Mr. Nguyen stood recreating a key moment from the film “Love Actually,” in which one character silently professes his love for another in writing by flashing a series of cue cards. There, in the storied Chelsea Hotel hallway still festooned with Christmas decorations, Mr. Nguyen shared his last card that said, “Will you marry me?”
They wed on April 11 in front of 200 guests at the Pump House, a covered space on the banks of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Mr. Nguyen’s sister, the Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen, who is ordained through the Unitarian Universalist Association, officiated.
Although formal attire was suggested, Ms. Lurio said that the ceremony was “pretty casual.” She and Jonathan got ready together, and their families served as their wedding parties.
“I said I wanted a five-minute wedding,” Ms. Lurio recalled, though the ceremony ended up lasting a little longer than that. During the ceremony, Ms. Nguyen read a homily and jokingly added that guests should not ask the bride and groom about their living arrangements, which will remain separate for the foreseeable future.
While watching Ms. Lurio walk down the aisle, flanked by her parents, Mr. Nguyen said he remembered feeling at once grounded in the moment and also a sense of dazed joy: “Like, is this real? I felt very lucky in that moment — and also just excited for the party to start!”
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