Lifestyle
'The Apprentice' director talks about the film Donald Trump doesn't want you to see
Jeremy Strong (left) as Roy Cohn and Sebastian Stan (right) as Donald Trump appear in Ali Abbasi’s film The Apprentice.
Pief Weyman/Briarcliff Entertainment
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Pief Weyman/Briarcliff Entertainment
At first glance, Ali Abbasi might seem like the least likely candidate to make a film about former President Donald Trump’s origin story.
The 43-year-old director was born in Tehran, lives in Denmark and has made films that deal with the supernatural (Border, 2018), horror (Shelley, 2016) and serial murder (Holy Spider, 2022). But that background also gives him a uniquely detached outlook on a deeply polarizing topic on the eve of November’s presidential election in which Trump is seeking another term.
“You’re so good with monsters and trolls… Do you want to make a movie about Donald Trump?” Abbasi recalls screenwriter Gabriel Sherman’s manager telling him in 2018. The Apprentice, out in theaters on Oct. 11, takes what Abbasi calls a “radically humanist angle.” The story focuses on Trump’s (Sebastian Stan) formative years as a New York real estate businessman under the tutelage of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), his attorney and unlikely mentor.
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Trump at first seems like a plucky, somewhat naïve young man trying to please his father
Similarly, Trump’s mistreatment of a dying Cohn toward the end of the film elicits empathy for the one-time mafia fixer and “Red Scare” prosecutor. Abbasi also mined Trump’s relationships with his older brother Fred (Charlie Carrick) and with his first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova).
Another character in the story is New York itself, portrayed in its ’70s and ’80s grime and grit glory with grainy, saturated documentary-like images.
Maria Bakalova plays Ivana Trump in Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, opposite Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump.
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Cohn, who also appears as a maligned figure in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, “is not as well known as he should be,” Abbasi told NPR’s A Martínez. “He was famously a closeted gay, homophobic, anti-intellectual intellectual, some say a self-hating Jew, all these contradictory things… But he was also a very colorful, very interesting person and charming and had a room full of frog dolls.”
Cohn died of AIDS complications in 1986, but he insisted to the end that his disease was liver cancer. In the months leading to his death, the man who had rubbed shoulders with celebrities and political heavyweights was disbarred and sued by the IRS for $7 million in back taxes.
Director Ali Abbasi on the set of The Apprentice.
Pief Weyman/Briarcliff Entertainment
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Abbasi sees Cohn as an integral part of the genealogy of the American populist right, and particularly adept at creating his own truth via the media. In one scene, Cohn tells Trump: “There is no right and wrong. There is no morality. There is no truth with a capital T. It’s a construct. It’s a fiction. It’s manmade. None of it matters except winning.”
The director recalls a conversation he had with Sherman, the screenwriter, about how Trump’s rise in American politics has been portrayed in the past.
“I told him that there’s this thing I feel in America that our liberal friends, they think he’s a monster and he showed up and destroyed the health care, destroyed the infrastructure. That also implies that we’re innocent, that we good liberal people, we tried to stop him and failed,” Abbasi said. “But that’s not the case… We’re sort of saying, ‘Oh, you think he’s the other. Let’s watch him. Let’s watch us, from his perspective. Is he really the other? Is it that different? Really?’”
Humanist or not, Trump’s portrait is unflattering and the film has been mired in controversy from the beginning
The film depicts a scene of Trump allegedly raping Ivana. In her divorce deposition, the Czech-born entrepreneur and model said that Trump had raped her in 1989 after undergoing a painful scalp reduction to remove a bald spot. She later walked back that claim in a statement published in the Harry Hurt III biography Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump (1993). In that statement, Ivana Trump said: “I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.” She died in 2022.
The Apprentice depicts Ivana (Maria Bakalova) and Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) falling in and out of love.
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Trump’s team made legal threats to prevent The Apprentice from being screened in the U.S. “When when we were premiering [at the] Cannes Film Festival, they made a very conscious attempt to scare away all the distributors, sending us a cease and desist letter… They were really succeeding in burying us, up until very, very recently,” Abbasi said.
At the same time, he added, financing for the film “fell apart” several times because liberal figures in the Hollywood scene thought the film was “too sympathetic” of Trump.
“What’s crazy is the whole notion that this is a controversial movie because there’s nothing really controversial about this… you could write the script with info from Wikipedia,” Abbasi added. “For me, that’s the most controversial part is that corporate Hollywood thinks that we’re dangerous and out there.”
Abbasi speaks of his film as “an experience” that takes the viewer through the arc of Trump going from fledgling businessman to the politician he is today. Rather than examining the hyper-polarized nature of American politics, Abbasi is interested in the underlying structure that fosters this kind of polarization.
“If there is a bigger sort of message in the movie, for me, it’s that… the fundamental levers of power, they’re not as partisan,” he said.
“This sort of flexibility of ideology, I think that’s interesting, because then it means that someone like Mr. Trump, when the time arrives, becomes a Republican after being Democrat for 30 years. I think that is the way to look at this system and, sort of try to tear this two-party thing… apart and look at the sort of the naked structure of power.”
The broadcast version of this story was produced by Julie Depenbrock. The digital version was edited by Obed Manuel.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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