OUT ON A LIMB WITH JEREMY STRONG
Whether he’s channeling one of 20th-century history’s greatest monsters, Roy Cohn, or immersing himself in coffee grounds for Ben Affleck, the Apprentice star goes all in on every performance. He’s aware that some people find his one-thousand-percent, irony-free commitment to the craft a little bit absurd; he’s OK with that. “I feel like, if you're not risking that,” he says, “then what are you risking?”
When Jeremy Strong signed on to play Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witchfinder general Roy Cohn in The Apprentice—a man who maintained a full-body tan year-round, collected ornamental frogs, and taught Donald Trump everything he knows about attacking, denying, and lying—he never imagined that Trump would be reelected. This wasn’t really the point; the film wasn’t supposed to be a political polemic. To him, it was a Frankenstein story: a character study about the making of a monster. That we are talking in the corner booth of a closed cocktail bar in London’s Covent Garden just weeks after the monster was inaugurated for the second time is not something Strong expected to happen. But the world got weirder while he waited.
The film was initially announced in May 2018, and then everything slowed down. There were delays in funding, there was a pandemic. The project was on and off again several times over. Sebastian Stan, who plays the future president, had to reverse course on his Trumpian weight gain to become shredded for a Marvel movie, until that too was delayed by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. When it finally premiered at Cannes to an eight-minute standing ovation (which Strong missed because he was performing on Broadway) there were still more delays to come. Trump’s legal team tried to block the film’s release, and it struggled to find a distributor in the USA. Ultimately, The Apprentice landed in theaters three weeks before the 2024 presidential election, at which point Trump posted on Truth Social calling it a “FAKE and CLASSLESS” movie and “a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job…to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country” and referring to everyone involved in it as “HUMAN SCUM.” You know, the usual.
“On the level of the art form, this was a feast,” says Strong. “On the level of the world that we're in, we're talking about a living danger.” He’s solemn as he says this. He doesn’t take it lightly. Strong, you may have heard, doesn’t take anything lightly.
Read more at GQ.