Sebastian Stan told a Tuesday press conference at the Cannes Film Festival that he’s “still purging” from the role that last brought him to the festival: playing Donald Trump in The Apprentice.
When he brought that film to Cannes, it was just months before the 2024 election. Now he’s back, getting rave reviews for playing a Romanian Christian conservative in Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, and Trump has been president again for over a year. Asked by The Hollywood Reporter how his understanding of the president has changed in the intervening time, Stan looked down and shook his head, as the press room exploded in laughter — assuming he was reacting to being asked a question that he didn’t want to answer.
Instead, Stan looked up with a fierce expression, and the room fell silent. “It’s just not a laughing matter, to be honest. It isn’t,” he said. “I think we’re in a really, really bad place. I really do. When you’re looking at what’s happening, which is the consolidation of the media, censorship, the threats, the supposed lawsuits that seemingly never end, but don’t actually go anywhere, you know, the writing was on the wall.”
The creative team had experienced this with The Apprentice, he said, “to the point where we were three days before the festival, unsure if the movie was going to play at the festival — and maybe more people are paying attention to the film, and I think we’ll stand the test of time for that — but we went through all of it way before Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. I wish it wasn’t like that.”
