The Apprentice added more to violent scene so ‘people could talk’ despite Trump’s threats-Tori Brazier-Entertainment – Metro

Maria Bakalova and Sebastian Stan as Ivana and Donald Trump in The Apprentice, which has a new edit (Picture: Pief Weyman/Briarcliff Entertainment)

Donald Trump biopic, The Apprentice, added ‘more’ to its most controversial scenes after premiering at Cannes.

The headline-grabbing movie was ready to ramp up its most eyebrow-raising content despite struggling to find a distributor – and despite attempts from Trump to get its release blocked.

Speaking at the film’s UK premiere during the London Film Festival on Tuesday, actress Maria Bakalova – who plays Ivana Trump – revealed that the film had been newly ‘edited’ since it was first shown to critics and other attendees at the prestigious French event.

‘We have a new edit!’ she confirmed to Metro, and when asked if she could tease how The Apprentice had been changed, she explained that the alterations were in fact extensions of some of the film’s ‘most talked about scenes’.

‘We decided that if people talked that much about them, maybe it’s right to give them a little bit more to talk about,’ she added.

As well as scenes depicting Trump (Sebastian Stan) undergoing scalp reduction surgery and having liposuction, the most unpleasant is unquestionably one where the businessman sexually assaults his wife during an argument.

In the film, he tells her he is no longer attracted to her and is provoked by her gifting him a book about female pleasure and the G spot.

He then snaps, cruelly tells her he is no longer attracted to her and wrestles her to the floor on her front, lying on top of her.

‘Is that your G spot? Did I find it?’ he then shouts as he roughly thrusts into a crying Ivana.

This sequence is actually based on Ivana’s divorce deposition in 1990 where she claimed her then-husband raped her and made her feel ‘violated’.

The movie has added to some of its more controversial scenes to give people ‘more to talk about’ (Picture: Briarcliff Entertainment)

Ivana and Donald Trump were married from 1977 until 1990 (Picture: Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)

The allegation was then published in 1993 book The Last Tycoon by Harry Hurt III – however, Ivana later retracted the accusation in 2015 and said she and her ex ‘were the best of friends’.

Trump’s camp initially publicly responded hours after its premiere in May, with the former president’s spokesperson Steven Cheung calling the film ‘garbage’ and claiming it ‘sensationalises lies that have been long debunked’.

‘This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should not see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire,’ the statement finished.

Since then, Trump’s team has worked to stop The Apprentice being released, sending cease and desist letters to director Ali Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman – but to no avail.

The movie is already out in the US, and releases on Friday in the UK.

However, it’s been hard to get to this position behind the scenes, with Sherman recounting to Metro how frustrating it was to see Hollywood baulk when they were searching for a distributor.

‘The Cannes premiere itself was exhilarating and exciting, but then afterwards all the Hollywood studios refused to buy the movie, and that was super disappointing,’ he revealed.

The Apprentice has had a rocky road to distribution, confirmed screenwriter Gabriel Sherman (R, next to director Ali Abbasi) (Picture: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for BFI)

‘We all knew the movie was good, and a movie of this quality normally would find a distributor. So to see Hollywood be so scared and cautious – we’re in the business to tell stories – that was really hard.’

Sherman even described The Apprentice as being ‘in Purgatory’ over the summer, when he ‘didn’t know [if] it was gonna come out at all’.

Ultimately, Briarcliff Entertainment bought the film for distribution, leading to the movie’s ability to appear at the London Film Festival, which Sherman called both ‘vindicating and overwhelming’.

In terms of portraying a real person – as Jeremy Strong does alongside Stan and Bakalova, as Trump’s aggressive mentor Roy Cohn – Oscar-nominee Bakalova admitted she did have reservations ‘at first’ as she ‘didn’t know a lot about her’.

‘I didn’t know that she’d been that smart because she’d been well-educated, and she’d been a hard worker, and she’d been brave, and she’d been outspoken – she’d been way too much ahead of her time. [Before] that, I had some hesitations because I didn’t want it to just play ‘beautiful model from Eastern Europe’.

Bakalova shared that she had initial reservations over playing a real-life person (Picture: Anthony Harvey/Shutterstock)

‘Getting to know about her, I became more excited now that I knew that there were layers to reach within her,’ the Borat star shared.

Trump also focused some of his most recent ire on how the film portrays his relationship with Ivana – who died in 2022 aged 73 – as he blasted it as ‘fake and classless’ and made by ‘human scum’ on Truth Social this week.

‘My former wife, Ivana, was a kind and wonderful person, and I had a great relationship with her until the day she died,’ he insisted, while slamming it as ‘a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job’.

Addressing his own transformation into Trump, Stan – who previously said he gained 15 pounds over two months for the role – revealed that it had taken him a while to get out of character after so long studying the ex-reality TV star.

‘Any time you’re spending a significant amount of time with trying to understand somebody emotionally, but also you’re trying to inhabit their skin and you’re watching them, you’re listening to them, you’re learning essentially,’ he told press including Metro.

Jeremy Strong (L) plays Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn in The Apprentice (Picture: Briarcliff Entertainment)

‘Your body’s like an instrument, it’s adapting to a way of speaking, some mannerisms that at first feel unnatural and then become organic over time when you’re not thinking about them. And then there’s a mindset that you adopt as well.

‘So as much time that goes into that is pretty much as much time as it takes to go out!’

He also discussed his discomfort over heading straight back into superhero land afterwards for Marvel movie, Thunderbolts.

‘I went off to do a movie after and I was wearing a suit and it was a little hard to be in the suit, I’ll say that,’ he chuckled.

The Apprentice is in UK cinemas from Friday.

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