In the wake of Sebastian Stan being Best Actor-nominated for his Donald Trump performance in The Apprentice, new critical light is being sher on “those small-minded, quarter-inch-deep publicists who forbade their clients from participating in a Variety ‘Actors on Actors’ segment with Stan” last November.

Stan: “I had an offer to do Variety‘s Actors on Actors, [but] I couldn’t find another actor to do it with me. [I’m] not pointing at anyone specific, but we couldn’t get past the publicists or the people representing them because they were too afraid to talk about this movie.”

Paul Schrader once told me in an interview that “cowardice doesn’t require a conspiracy“…meaning that cowardice springs up naturally on its own…it’s a trait that’s built into people or certainly built into the less secure.

It goes without saying that none of the twitchy reps who kept their clients from chatting with Stan for the proposed ‘Actors on Actors’ segment will ever admit to having done so, and even if exposed they sure as hell won’t explain what exactly their thinking may have been at the time.

But if just one of these publicists were to come forward and make a clean breast of things by admitting to having wimped out, I would take my hat off in respect. What are the odds of this happening? Zilch.

From HE’s “Apprentice Is Pure Pleasure,” posted from Cannes on 5.20.24:

“‘All hail Sebastian Stan‘s Trump, a note-perfect capturing of this amiable, malevolent psychopath, who apparently exuded a certain naivete and behaved in a semi-understandable fashion and may have been half-human when he was working in a senior capacity for his father’s real-estate company in the ’70s.’

“Last May Variety‘s Tatiana Siegel quoted an ‘insider’ saying that ‘audiences may find The Apprentice to be an oddly humanizing portrait’ of Trump. Excuse me? Young Trump seems like a semi-tolerable fellow at first, but he gradually morphs into a fuckhead…a killer. The truth is that Abassi’s film is an oddly humanizing portrait of Cohn as it invites the audience to share Cohn’s sense of betrayal…you actually feel sorry for this icon of evil when Trump gives him the cold shoulder.

“Strong’s Cohn is magnificent — he should definitely win the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actor prize, the size of the role be damned. Cohn to Trump at film’s halfway point: ‘You’ve got a fat ass. You should do something about that.’ Strong is wonderful!”