In Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, there’s a scene in which Donald Trump (played by Sebastian Stan) undergoes a hair transplant to remove a bald spot and liposuction to look slimmer.
The film follows Trump’s rise from his start as a local real estate developer in the 1970s to his rise to national celebrity in the 1980s. He learns power games from Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), a ruthless and hedonistic political fixer. Hair department head Michelle Cote, along with prosthetics department heads Sean Sansom and Brandi Boulet, were the craftsmen who transformed Stan into Trump and helped pull off the sequence.
Over time, Trump began to lose his hair and gained weight to the point where he took amphetamines to help lose weight. But it doesn’t work.
Stan gained 15 pounds for the role to reflect Trump’s physical transformation. The costume department also created a padded suit with a prosthetic abdomen. “In the scenes where his shirt comes off or his robe opens, we put him in fake clothes,” Boulet says. The team used the artificial abdomen in a look they dubbed “Pills Donny.”
“As part of Sebastian’s ‘Pills Donnie’ look, we created a fake stomach. That was my favorite because Sebastian was all red, covered in spots, eating all the time, and sweating. It was scratched and a little disorganized,” Boulet explains.
Michael Walsh, provided by Briarcliff Entertainment and Rich Spirit
Due to hair loss and weight gain, Trump resorts to plastic surgery in the film. For the hair transplant scene, Sansom reveals, “We used a fake top of the head that has a scalp.” Michelle was wearing a wig, and the part where her scalp would be removed had been cut out. The hair was plucked out one strand at a time, and the scalpel was also engraved with blood lines. And it was shot in one day. ”
When audiences were first introduced to Trump, he was much younger, so Boulet used a prosthetic lift piece on Stan’s face. “We lifted the cheeks and eyes to tighten the face and make it look younger,” Boulet explains, adding, “We went for a skin tone a little lighter than the classic orange you’d see at the end.” I did,” he added.
Cote even gave Stan a blonde wig with medium-length sideburns for the early stages of Trump’s presidency. However, it was an evolving look, with his eyebrows, hair, and skin tone all changing over time. “When he was younger, his hair was golden because he went out a lot and he had natural highlights,” Cote explains. “As I got older, I lost my highlights and[my hair]got darker.”
Michael Walsh, provided by Briarcliff Entertainment and Rich Spirit
To capture Trump’s aging, Boulet will lower Stan’s lift piece. Cheek plumpers were then added to “fill in” the actor’s chiseled face and defined cheekbones. “He didn’t have his upper dental plates covering his teeth. They were lumps under his lip that were pushing that part of (his mouth) out further and flattening it out,” Samson explains. “And from the nose down they were put in his lower lip to give him a Donald-like look.”
One of the challenges the team had to solve was Stan’s facial hair. After shooting all day long, Stan’s facial hair began to grow, requiring regular touch-ups. “The minute he starts shaving, he gets a five o’clock shadow, so we’ve had to work on little things like having to cover it up and blend in prosthetics.”
Makeup artist Colin Penman recalled being mesmerized as he watched Stan and Maria Bakalova, who played Ivana Trump, reenact the 1988 Oprah Winfrey interview. “There’s a fine line between not wanting to do a parody, so we thought there was something there. We want it to be real,” he says.
Michael Walsh, provided by Briarcliff Entertainment and Rich Spirit
In addition to gaining weight, Stan is now ready to act and capture the essence of the former president. “On the production floor, we had a large file of reference videos and photos that everyone used,” Sansom says. “We tried to recreate and recreate some of the photos as best we could.”
Boulet added: “Sebastian had everything. His phone was full of research. He would come in the morning and study and watch videos.”
Cheek plumpers were added to reshape Sebastian Stan’s chiseled features.
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