Sebastian Stan on Trump: ‘We’re in a Really Bad Place’

Sebastian Stan wasn’t in the mood for nervous laughter. At a Cannes press conference Monday for his new film Fjord, the actor was asked about The Apprentice — his 2024 Trump biopic — and what he makes of it now that the former subject of that film has been back in the White House for over a year. The journalists in the room chuckled. Stan didn’t.

“It’s not a laughing matter, to be honest,” he said, his tone unmistakably grave. “It isn’t.”

He kept going. “I think we’re in a really, really bad place. I really do. And to be honest with you, when you’re looking at what’s happening — if we’re talking about the consolidation of the media, censorship, threats, the supposed lawsuits that seemingly never end but don’t actually go anywhere. You know, the writing was on the wall. We encountered all that with the movie.”

The Apprentice Flashback: Three Days of Uncertainty

Stan was referring to the chaos that surrounded the Ali Abbasi-directed film’s world premiere at Cannes in 2024. Trump had threatened a lawsuit before the festival, calling the movie “garbage” and “pure fiction” — and for a moment, it wasn’t clear whether the film would screen at all.

“Three days before the festival, [we were] unsure if the movie was going to play the festival,” Stan said. “So maybe people are paying attention more to that film. I think it will stand the test of time for that. But we went through all of it, right before Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert and so on. So, I wish it wasn’t like that.”

That the experience of making and releasing The Apprentice now feels like a preview of a larger pattern — the threats, the legal noise, the pressure on media — is clearly something Stan has been sitting with.

Now Back at Cannes With a Different Kind of Film

This time around, Stan is at the festival for something very different. Fjord, directed by Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu, follows a devoutly religious Romanian family who have immigrated to a small Norwegian village. When bruises are discovered on their daughter’s body at school, all five of their children are removed by authorities — and what follows is a wrenching legal and emotional ordeal. Stan plays the father opposite Renate Reinsve.

The film received a 10-minute standing ovation at its Cannes premiere Monday night. That kind of reception at this festival means something, especially with this particular team attached.

Mungiu already has a Palme d’Or on his shelf — he won it in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and Fjord is his seventh film to compete at the festival. Reinsve, for her part, won the Best Actress prize here for The Worst Person in the World, and was back at Cannes just last year with Sentimental Value, which took the Grand Prix and later won the Best International Feature Oscar. The combination of those three names makes Fjord one of the most serious Palme d’Or contenders of this year’s competition.

But it was Stan’s words about America — not the film’s accolades — that the room walked away thinking about. “I wish it wasn’t like that” might be the quietest, most honest thing said at Cannes this week.