Sebastian Stan's loved ones worried about his safety playing Donald Trump

The Apprentice director Ali Abbasi observes in a new Entertainment Weekly profile that Sebastian Stan has a way of making unsympathetic “douchebag” characters likable. Well, there is perhaps no less sympathetic douchebag alive today than Donald Trump, though it’s hard to imagine making him appear likable at this stage. “It’s funny, I felt similarly about a few things I’ve worked on,” Stan tells the outlet. “My initial reaction is, ‘Wow, how the hell am I going to do this?'”

The truth is, many people didn’t want him to do the movie at all, and told him so. “I had people tell me I don’t look like him. I had people tell me that it’s not safe for me to do it. I had people say that I shouldn’t try to alienate half the country,” Stan says. But he found the anxiety “weirdly motivating” because he has a “very interesting relationship with fear.” And he had also always “felt there was something to the man that needed to be heard.” 

In a weird way, Stan could even relate to Trump: “I understood that drive to rise, to overcome at whatever cost, and to win. I understood that simply from my own very, very small, humble beginnings with the American dream,” he says, having immigrated to the U.S from Romania when he was 12. “We love a winner in this country. It’s a fact that, to me, felt relatable in many ways.” Beyond that, the actor thinks “there is value in normalizing people that we feel strongly about,” and people obviously feel pretty strongly about Donald Trump. Finding sympathy for the future president in his origin story isn’t meant to make Trump more palatable, just more human, rather than the larger-than-life villain he’s become. Most view him as “either God’s son or he’s Lucifer incarnate,” Stan says, “and I think we need to bring him back down to earth.”