The Academy Awards are this Sunday. We hear from the two stars of the film The Apprentice, Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong. It's about how a young Donald Trump was influenced by the infamous, unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn. Also, we hear from Adrien Brody, who is nominated for his starring role in the film The Brutalist, in which he plays a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who seeks a fresh start in post-WWII America.John Powers reviews the animated film Flow, which has been nominated for both best animated feature and best international film.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who are the featured guests on this episode?
Oh, it is totally my pleasure. You know, a biopic is different from a film based on an original story. So you had a character who was a known person who you had to portray. What did you do to know, to watch, to listen to him before playing him?
Yeah, you know, I'll just say I haven't watched the film in a while. And hearing that scene back, it's really so charged, isn't it? And Roy, in that scene, encapsulates the playbook, which the film examines the idea that, you know, what Roy Cohn stood for, these principles that he passed on to Donald Trump, always attack, deny everything, and never admit defeat.
They're all kind of the DNA of that scene. It contains all of them. It's a great introduction of a character. But your question about playing historical figures, you know, I've done a fair amount of work playing people who, you know, were either alive or were historical figures. John Nicolay in Lincoln, James Reeb.
in selma jerry rubin in in the charlotte chicago seven lee harvey oswald um i feel always a an enormous sense of responsibility to a kind of historical veracity and accuracy to try and capture and render the essence of these people. And ultimately, it's not an intellectual, you're not writing an essay on someone. So the information is sort of emotional, intuitive, visceral information.
Did you ever fact check any of it? Like, do you feel a responsibility to not only be have acting truth, but have, you know, like fact truth?
Absolutely. Yes, I absolutely feel a sort of fidelity to truth with a capital T, which is funny in this case, because Roy Cohn, if he's anything, to me, he's like the progenitor of alternative facts. He's like not someone who really espoused truth with a capital T. He thought truth was a plaything that you could do as you wish with it.
And I should mention here that the film was written by Gabriel Sherman, who is a journalist who wrote a book about Murdoch and Fox News.
Yeah, a book about Roger Ailes.
Yeah, I should have said Ailes, right?
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Chapter 2: What role does Jeremy Strong play in 'The Apprentice'?
at a certain point you develop a trust in your unconscious intuitive self that if it's properly absorbed
something then it will be there somehow now the the the the I think voice is very important to me for any character and Roy had a very very particular way of speaking and a very specific pentameter and the music of that is something that becomes your job to both master and then throw away you know he writes in in
In Hamlet, Shakespeare says that use can almost change the stamp of nature, and I feel that actors, especially when you're attempting to do some kind of transformational work, which is the kind of work that I love the most and have been inspired by in my life the most. Your job is to kind of change the stamp of your nature.
And voice is a really key part of that because there's something about a person's voice that is like their eyes. It's such a way in to that person.
Well, why don't we listen to the real Roy Cohn's voice? This is from an interview with Tom Snyder on his late night show Tomorrow.
I probably watched this a thousand times. Really?
As broadcast in 1977. So here we go.
Now here's Roy Cohn, who appeared recently on the cover of Esquire magazine. And the title of that article, as I recall, sir, was The Legal Executioner. And went on to say that you are really a tough man and that at times you can... Tough, mean, vicious. That's all. What does that kind of publicity do for your business in New York?
It's fantastic.
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