‘The Algorithms Are Harsh Masters.’ Jeremy Strong on Taking a Risk With a New Film About Trump

Jeremy Strong is not known for his sense of humor. When getting dressed, he favors brown for its “monastic” connotation. He famously thought that Succession, the HBO show that shot him to stardom, was a straight drama when his co-stars believed it to be a comedy. When he sits down for our Zoom conversation in September—in a brown shirt, of course—he recites poetry and quotes Stella Adler, the godmother of Method acting. He describes Succession as reflecting “the Emersonian notion of the institution as the shadow of a man.”

But when I suggest that he could have capitalized on that show’s success by earning a hefty paycheck from a superhero movie—as many in his position have done—he cracks a self-aware smile. The notion that he, an actor who insists on disposing of his own personality in order to fully inhabit a character, would implement that extreme approach to play a spandex-wearing hero is, indeed, funny.

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Strong, once an eager upstart, has arguably grown into the pretentiousness he’s been accused of in the past. Before answering a question, he tends to lean back in his chair, look up at the ceiling, and actually consider his words rather than rattling off a canned quote. He has let himself go a bit gray, the effect closer to thoughtful professor than Succession’s hapless nepo baby Kendall Roy.

After four seasons of rapturous acclaim and accolades for that role—not to mention a Best Actor Tony for a recent run of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People on Broadway—Strong had his pick of films. “There’s a lot of, like, finance-bro projects coming my way,” he says. “You know, the son of a dynastic fill-in-the-blank.” It’s the type of pigeonholing some actors would readily build a career upon, but he dismissed those offers. Instead, this fall he is playing—to riff on Emerson—a man who overshadows the institution that is Donald Trump’s Republican Party: Roy Cohn.

Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice tells the story of Donald Trump’s rise in 1970s and '80s New York under the tutelage of Cohn. The gritty film introduces Trump (Sebastian Stan) as a fumbling brat before Cohn teaches him to bully his way to fame through aggression, half-truths, and blanket denials. For much of the film, Strong sports a fake tan and Speedos, barking orders at the trembling man who would become the 45th U.S. President.

Read more: The Apprentice Is a Subtle Act of Resistance

Despite its premiering at the Cannes Film Festival to positive reviews, no studio was willing to distribute the film in U.S. theaters. Trump’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter, and one of the film’s key financiers sold his stake over “creative differences.” “Everybody was afraid to touch this movie,” says Strong. It includes a scene of Trump raping his then wife Ivana (based on her divorce deposition, now recanted) and another of him receiving cosmetic surgery. “As allegedly liberal or courageous as Hollywood might be, it was dismaying to all of us to see how risk-averse everyone was,” says Strong. “In the summer, when it really looked like this movie was going to be censored, that just felt like a harbinger of something extremely dark to me.”

After many months in limbo, The Apprentice found a willing distributor and will hit theaters just weeks before the U.S. presidential election. Strong is relieved because he fears that Hollywood no longer produces provocative art. “I’m trying to find material that feels like it’s about something that matters,” he says. “I guess I feel like the world is on fire, and I’m not that interested in laundry-folding content.”

One day during the shoot, Strong asked the costume designer to find him a full-body frog suit. Cohn, who made his name prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, also happened to collect frog paraphernalia. Later that day, Strong filmed an entire dream sequence in a frog costume, serenading the future President in bed with “I Am What I Am” from La Cage aux Folles.

The sequence contains Freudian layers: The 1978 comedy tells the story of a gay couple who masquerade as straight to be accepted by the conservative parents of their son’s fiancée. Cohn, a closeted gay man and influential Republican, maintained he was neither queer nor HIV-positive until the day he succumbed to AIDS. To position Cohn in bed next to Trump, a notorious hypochondriac, highlights their strained relationship as Trump rose and Cohn fell in New York high society.

The sequence was cut, to Strong’s dismay, because they couldn’t get the rights to the song. “His legacy is this defiant denial of objective reality, of his emotional reality, of his homosexuality, and all of the shame and self-hatred he experienced,” Strong says. “It all caught up with him in the end, HIV and being disbarred. I couldn’t help but feel a kind of pity for him.”

The movie’s insistence on humanizing its subjects has raised eyebrows on the left even as its subject matter has drawn scorn from the right. “I’ve heard that I might have made him too human. I don’t know what that means. We’re all human,” Strong says.

“It’s a gift that actors get to suspend judgment and attempt to empathize even with people who others would say are despicable. It’s very dangerous, this idea that some people are not worthy of empathy.” He quotes the writer William Saroyan: “Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand.”

To understand a person Strong describes as one of the worst humans of the 20th century, he watched interviews, listened to recordings, and tried to reconcile Cohn’s contradictions. “This person was both monstrous and childlike, gleeful and absolutely vicious,” he says. “I’m always looking for the possibility of transformation and risk.”

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Strong underwent a physical transformation, including donning prosthetics and embarking on what he admits was a “kind of dangerous level of rapid weight loss.” But he quickly dismisses any discussion of bodily changes, often rewarded by the Academy. “You have to put your body, which is your instrument, through things to render something precisely. But that stuff all feels cosmetic. The really important thing is the inner stuff.” Strong calls inhabiting Cohn’s mind entering “the heart of darkness.” 

This isn’t the first fictional portrayal of Cohn. He is a prominent character in the Pulitzer-winning play Angels in America, which interrogates Cohn’s own hypocrisy during the AIDS epidemic. Al Pacino won an Emmy for the role in the HBO version. Strong, as revealed in a New Yorker profile, is perhaps Pacino’s biggest fan. He grew up with a poster of the Dog Day Afternoon actor on his wall and reportedly nearly bankrupted Yale’s theater group creating an award for Pacino to lure him to speak on campus. “If anything, my hesitation was taking it on because of what Al did, and the anxiety of influence,” he says. Cohn, in Strong’s head, wasn’t the real-life man but Pacino’s version. “And, you know, he’s someone who I revere,” Strong says of Pacino, again permitting himself a knowing grin.

Strong aspires to a type of acting career that doesn’t really exist anymore, the kind someone like his Lincoln co-star Daniel Day-Lewis and few others have been able to craft. Indeed, Strong is dismayed by the direction of Hollywood studios. He has spent three years working with the Danish filmmaker Tobias Lindholm trying to get a movie made about the mass tort brought by Sept. 11 first responders for health care. He sat with firefighters and EMTs during the research process, but no studio would make the film. “That’s something I feel absolutely crushed that people won’t get to see,” he says. He blames the industry’s fear of unique ideas. “The algorithms are harsh masters.”

Strong chooses every project with intention—films by Steven Spielberg (Lincoln), Adam McKay (The Big Short), and Aaron Sorkin (The Trial of the Chicago 7) that dig into critical moments in history. He’s set to star in a limited series about the Boeing 737 Max crashes from the screenwriter of Argo. But he says his decision to take on two political projects in an election year was largely happenstance. In An Enemy of the People, he played a scientist whose warnings of ecological disaster are shouted down by self-interested townspeople, a parable for the politicization of climate change.

The material he takes on cannot always be so dark. “There are certain things I would not be able to touch anymore,” he admits. “I’ve become more conscious, because I have three small kids, of what I am putting into the world. Am I adding one qubit of light to the world?” 

To that end, he is preparing for a role in a Bruce Springsteen biopic. Strong treated himself to what he describes as a spiritual experience at a Springsteen concert in Asbury Park, N.J. the night before we speak, and, earlier this summer, in a field in Denmark, where his family has a home. Swaying to Springsteen’s music in a field with 70,000 Danish revelers healed his soul after its immersion into Cohn’s psyche. Though, as he thinks about it, embodying Cohn had its strange delights. “Roy was actually a pretty gleeful guy and had a relatively uncomplicated relationship to the awful things he did,” he says. “He did them without conscience or shame. The truth is, it’s probably more difficult to watch someone like Roy Cohn than it was to be him.”