Will Leitch is the author of “The Time Has Come,” a contributing editor at New York magazine and founder of Deadspin.
By Will Leitch
It’s a beautifully played moment by Stan, an excellent, underappreciated actor … and it completely takes you out of the movie. Because say what you will about Donald Trump, but: Sadness? Pity? Pain? Love? Just who does Stan think he’s playing?
At the core of the many problems with “The Apprentice” is one that it shares with just about every other dramatic project about the man who has dominated just about every American conversation of the past decade: It has no idea what to do with Trump. How do you fictionalize the most ubiquitous human on Earth? How do you satirize the unsatirizable? How do you add shading to a man who lacks it? Stan’s hardly the first actor to get caught in this theatrical cul-de-sac.
Portraying Trump — and, even harder, finding some sort of insight about him — has proved nearly impossible for both comedians and artists for decades. “Saturday Night Live” has cast six actors to portray Trump (seven if you count Trump himself), ranging from a straight Rich Little-esque impersonation (Darrell Hammond) to terrible Catskillsian indulgent mugging (Alec Baldwin) to the current portrayal by James Austin Johnson, which is funny but empty, essentially the equivalent of one of those “Spitting Image” puppets from the old British television show. Because Trump is such a ridiculous person, it’s nearly impossible not to play him as a cartoon in a way that can’t help but defang any satire and play into Trump’s hands, making him appear so silly that he seems harmless, when he is of course anything but. Johnny Depp’s downright dire Funny or Die mock-TV-movie of “The Art of the Deal” is the nadir of this genre.
One of the biggest problems with playing Trump is that actors need something to hold on to, a core emotional motivation that they can relate to and build a performance around. An impersonation is just that: a mimicry. Actors are forever looking for a soul. One of the greatest actor-as-president performances is Anthony Hopkins’ in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon.” Hopkins looks and sounds nothing like Nixon, but he captures the tragedy of what drove Nixon — that twisting and corrosive mix of ambition, insecurity, envy and grievance. It is, as Roger Ebert wrote in his review, a performance in which “there is no gloating, but a watery sigh, as of a great ship sinking.” But searching for a soul in Trump is a fool’s errand. Stan goes exploring for a treasure that doesn’t seem to exist.
There has been one performance, however, that not only nailed Trump cold but also has changed the way I’ve thought of him since. The actor didn’t try to make Trump larger or smaller but rather took him head-on, attempting not to capture who Trump may or may not be at his core but instead what it’s like to be caught in his orbit — to be forever sucked into his black hole.
The late-September 2020 Showtime two-part series “The Comey Rule” was meant — in a way not dissimilar from “The Apprentice” — to be a sort of October surprise, a stab at influencing the public late in an electoral cycle. Written and directed by Oscar-nominated (and vocal Trump critic on Twitter) Billy Ray, it dramatizes the story of James B. Comey in the days leading up to the 2016 election and the fraught weeks afterward. The series is snappy and entertaining, if a bit pulpy, and if I’m being honest, I think I’ve hit the upper dosage limits of Jeff Daniels playing noble avatars for the American spirit. The first half of the show is an earnest procedural of bureaucratic intrigue, but then the narrative shifts thanks to the looming presence of Trump, introduced with a shot from behind his head, like Jason Voorhees surveying the teenagers he’ll soon be making his prey.
Brendan Gleeson, an Irish actor with a charming brogue and an uncanny ability to project quiet menace, has only given one interview about his approach to playing Trump, and it’s a telling one. “I can’t see that there’s a private part to discover necessarily,” said Gleeson, who turned down the part several times before finally relenting.
What Gleeson landed on — in an insight that maybe can be found only from art rather than journalism — was a simple observation: Trump is unstoppable. “Here’s a dude who is actually used to getting what he wants by hook or by crook,” Gleeson said. “This is a person and this is how he gets what he wants. ... It’s serious. This is not a circus.”
Gleeson’s Trump is not charming or comical or silly. He finds your weakness, focuses solely on it and never relents. His Trump comes into a room full of people who think they can deal with him the way they have dealt with most normal humans, and when he leaves the room, everyone and everything inside has been torn apart — and Trump has gotten exactly what he wanted. He’s not Donald Trump, goofy guy with weird hair, bizarre vocal inflections and obsession with windmills; he’s a hurricane, an act of God, an unstoppable force of nature.
Gleeson does not to try to humanize Trump anymore than you would humanize the tornadoes in “Twisters.” He instead zeroes in on how feeble, confused and impotent his relentlessness can make the rest of us feel. The last thing in the world you want to do while watching Gleeson’s Trump is laugh.
What really matters about Donald Trump is not his relationship with his brother or his father. The story is what his Thanos-like inevitability says about us: our vanities, our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities, our complicities. An actor putting on a Trump costume disguises him the same way Trump disguises himself.
