Les célébrités ne veulent plus parler de Trump

In the weeks since the election, Donald Trump has enjoyed an alarming amount of support from influencers, celebrities, and billionaires, while many other famous people have remained notably quiet. And according to Sebastian Stan, who portrays Trump in the vaguely controversial movie The Apprentice, people in Hollywood really do not want to say bad things about Donald Trump.

During a panel for a screening of the movie, which came out last month and stars Stan as Trump during the early years of his career, Stan said he couldn’t participate in Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series because no publicist would agree to let their client talk about the movie with him.

“I had an offer to do a Variety “Actors on Actors” this Friday,” Stan said onstage, “and I couldn’t find another actor to do it with me, because they were too afraid to go and talk about this movie.” Explaining that his team “couldn’t get past the publicists,” Stan said, “That’s when I think we lose the situation. If it really becomes that fear or that discomfort to talk about this, then we’re really going to have a problem.”

Speaking with IndieWire, Variety co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh confirmed that the publication invited Stan to “participate in ‘Actors on Actors,’” and that “other actors didn’t want to pair with him because they didn’t want to talk about Donald Trump.”

The Apprentice, which zooms in on Trump’s relationship with his mentor, Roy Cohn, came out in October after an initial Cannes screening in May. The film had reportedly struggled to find distribution in the U.S. because of its controversial content, which includes a rape allegation Trump’s first wife, Ivana, made during their divorce proceedings (and which she later recanted) and detailed depictions of Trump’s rumored scalp-reduction surgery and liposuction. Trump sent the filmmakers a cease-and-desist letter in May but ultimately did not pursue legal action, instead calling the film a “politically disgusting hatchet job” in a late-night Truth Social post. Obviously, The Apprentice did not do much damage to Trump’s popularity — or his chances in the election — but it is apparently spicy enough that publicists don’t want to touch it with a ten-foot microphone.

In fact, the movie industry writ large seems much more spooked about criticizing Trump than it was in 2016. Last week, seemingly bowing to pressure from Disney, Rachel Zegler, who is playing Snow White in an upcoming film adaptation, apologized for making negative comments about Trump and his supporters. I feel great about where this all is leading, don’t you?