The dark heart of Donald Trump.

The Apprentice’ peers into the dark heart of Donald Trump.

Before his transformation into the infamous politician we now know him to be, Trump was a young striver taken under the wing of Roy Cohn. The forthcoming film, starring Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, and Maria Bakalova, dramatizes their sinister bond. “I think of it as a love story, really,” Strong tells VF. “It’s a chaste love story between a teacher and a pupil—these two men from the boroughs who aspired to Fifth Avenue.”

From director Ali Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, ‘The Apprentice’ is a gritty, indie thriller set in ’70s New York, bringing an outsider’s perspective to iconic—and in many corners, despised by the New York Jews who did not make any money off him - American figures and contextualizing them through a kinetic cinematic lens.