When the 2025 Oscar nominations were announced on Thursday, one of the most surprising nods went to Sebastian Stan for Best Actor — the first of his career.
The surprise, to be clear, wasn’t seeing Stan’s name in such lofty company. Long a fan favorite for his roles as Gossip Girl’s Carter Baizen and Marvel’s Bucky Barnes, Stan, 42, has enjoyed a breakout year on the big screen. So much so that he won a Golden Globe (for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy) earlier this month.
But Stan got his Golden Globe for portraying an actor with neurofibromatosis who undergoes an experimental procedure to change his face in A Different Man.
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His Oscar nomination, in contrast, is for playing Donald Trump in The Apprentice.
It’s hard to imagine a more fraught performance — or a more charged moment for it to be recognized. Since 1929, the academy has nominated seven other actors for playing U.S. presidents, but none of those presidents were still in office — issuing controversial executive orders, dividing public opinion and generally dominating American public life — when the nods were unveiled. Instead, they were all historical figures: preserved in the past, without any real power to influence the present.
But Trump is arguably the most powerful person in the world. And Stan’s path to the Oscars has been anything but assured as a result.
Written by journalist Gabriel Sherman and directed by filmmaker Ali Abbasi, The Apprentice attempts to tell Trump’s “origin story” through the lens of his relationship with notorious New York lawyer Roy Cohn (played by Succession star Jeremy Strong).
Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn and Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump in The Apprentice. (Briarcliff Entertainment/Courtesy Everett Collection)
“Looking back on some of those earlier interviews with [Trump] when he was really young and trying to get tax abatements to [build] the Grand Hyatt, there was something … pure and honest,” Stan told Yahoo Entertainment in October. “There was great potential that I saw in that person at that time.”
In Stan’s view, it was the hard-charging Cohn who taught Trump to be more “brutal.”
“The loss of empathy and humanity, I think, was really tragic,” Stan said.
Speaking to Yahoo Entertainment, Abbasi described The Apprentice — which depicts Trump raping his first wife Ivana, downing amphetamines to lose weight and battling baldness with liposuction and plastic surgery — as “raw but balanced.” (Ivana Trump accused her then-husband of rape in a sworn 1990 divorce deposition, then recanted the accusation in 1993, saying she felt “violated” but did not mean for her words to be interpreted “in a literal or criminal sense.”)
Needless to say, Trump and those around him see The Apprentice differently. Early investor Dan Snyder, a billionaire who once owned the NFL’s Washington Commanders and donated more than a million dollars to Trump’s political efforts, was reportedly “furious” with a February 2024 rough cut; lawyers for his production company soon began to fight its release.
When the film finally debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, Trump’s attorneys responded with a cease-and-desist letter seeking to block “all marketing, distribution, and publication.” Trump himself weighed in on Truth Social a few months later, calling The Apprentice “a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job” made by “HUMAN SCUM” and designed to “hurt” him “right before the 2024 Presidential Election.”
Hollywood wasn’t particularly welcoming, either. According to Abbasi, both Paul Thomas Anderson and Clint Eastwood passed on directing the film due to “business risk,” and almost every Hollywood studio declined to distribute it.
“I wasn’t naive about [Trump] being a divisive figure,” the director told Yahoo Entertainment, “but I was maybe a bit naive about how the rest of the world would embrace that and how the corporate structure in Hollywood would want to jump on the opportunity.”
With a limited budget for marketing and distribution, The Apprentice opened on Oct. 11 and earned just $17.3 million at the box office. The following month, Stan revealed at a Q&A that Variety had invited him to participate in its Actors on Actors series — but that none of his counterparts would agree to a mutual interview.
“Actors, directors, producers, writers who have seen the movie rave about it” in private, Stan said, “but I couldn’t find another actor to do it with me because they were too afraid to go and talk about this movie.”
“We couldn’t get past the publicists or the people representing them,” he added.
(In a statement to USA Today, Variety co-editor in chief Ramin Setoodeh confirmed that “other actors didn’t want to pair with [Stan] because they didn’t want to talk about Donald Trump.”)
In a way, then, Thursday’s Oscar nomination represents vindication for Stan: a belated public admission of what industry types were privately telling him all along. Now academy voters have an opportunity to send Trump a message on March 2. It will be fascinating to see if they take it.
