How Sebastian Stan Transformed Into Donald Trump

If you think you’ve been seeing a lot of Donald Trump lately, just imagine being Brandi Boulet.

The Toronto-based prosthetic and makeup artist who worked on The Apprentice spent months studying the once and future president to capture his hair, face and body as it aged.

“[We would] change his foundation as he started getting a little bit darker but not quite orange yet. We changed his sideburns throughout, depending on what [life] stage we were at, changed the color of his eyebrows, the color of his wig, and then we’d put a bald plate on him that you could see through the wig as his hair was starting to thin,” she said, describing the process of turning Sebastian Stan into the leader of the free world. “When he looked his worst and he was on diet pills, we’d make him sweaty and we’d do all this breakdown on his skin with broken capillaries.”

It was all part of an intensive and large-scale effort to create cinematic versions of Trump and Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) for Ali Abbasi’s recently released independent drama about the mogul turned politician’s relationship with his polarizing lawyer.

Boulet, makeup department head Colin Penman, hair department head Michelle Côté and prosthetics department head Sean Sansom worked feverishly to get the actors into their looks.

That began in the research. Côté says Trump’s life is so well documented that it was easy to find archival images to re-create his infamous hairstyle. “I had three wigs to work with,” she tells THR about the hairpieces that represented the various stages of Trump’s life.

Boulet and Sansom also altered the prosthetics to differentiate time periods. “In his youngest stage, he was more blond and his skin was paler,” says Boulet. “We had one prosthetic appliance that we used through the whole film for all of his stages, and our application of that would change depending on whether he was younger, older or chubbier. For when he was younger, we used lifts on [Sebastian] to pull his face back and give him a younger appearance.” Sansom adds, “It gave him more of the profile we know of him — his neck is more straight to his chin.” Then they shifted modes for his “business” stage. A prosthetic belly was also used.

To achieve Cohn’s look, Penman watched such documentaries as Matt Tyrnauer’s 2019 film Where’s My Roy Cohn? “Roy had specific traits,” says Penman. “He had a bone spur removed from his nose when he was young, so he had this effect on his nose, and he had this sort of dead stare, so Sean made these great pieces that we used to pull his eyes down a bit.” Additionally, there was a lot of tanning involved because “Cohn used to say you could never be too rich or too tan.”

The team also collaborated with Strong on Cohn’s look. He came into the process having done plenty of research of his own. “He had a lot of great ideas,” says Penman. “Working with someone like Jeremy really pushes you out of your comfort zone.”

Throughout the film, Cohn grows weaker and sicker as he battles a condition he said was liver disease, though it is widely believed he died from AIDS-related complications. (He died in 1986 at the age of 59.) The makeup department used Cohn’s desire to be tanned as a device to show his sickness taking a toll on his body.

“He becomes paler and paler until eventually we’re getting into the jaundiced yellows and different tones that were super sickly,” Penman says. “Sean also created a second-stage appliance that went under his eyes that pronounced his sunken cheekbones, and there was a lot of shading on top of these amazing pieces that accentuated the bone structure in his face. Michelle grayed up his hair, and the costuming became slightly larger to make him look lighter.”

Nailing the look for the late Ivana Trump was more challenging; there weren’t many photos of her from her modeling days before she met Trump. “Once she was more in the spotlight, there were a lot of images to grab, and we also used other images from New York at that time, so there was a lot of material to focus on,” says Penman.

Given Trump’s signature appearance, artists wanted to stay as close as possible to his look but allowed themselves creative license “within reason.”

“Some of the scenes that we were filming were based on events that were well documented, so it was easy to get the archival photographs of that,” Sansom says. Boulet adds, “You can see that with our costumes, the hair and makeup, we followed exactly what the interviews showed.”

“We tried to get Sebastian as close as possible [to Trump’s look],” she notes, saying that the demanding shooting schedule — 50 locations in 30 days — sometimes required them to change Trump’s look on the go. “There were some liberties that were taken, like we made him super red and sweaty for the end of the movie, and maybe he didn’t look like that every day.”

Côté says that at first, getting Stan into his look took two and a half hours every day, but by the end of the shoot, the team was able to get it done in 75 minutes. Penman and Sansom had Strong’s makeup down to 30 minutes a day and would touch up his tan by having a spray booth set up right on set.

“It’s too bad we didn’t have a camera, like a time-lapse, capturing it all,” Penman says.

For their efforts, Trump weighed in with his review.

He called the movie “FAKE and CLASSLESS” in a Truth Social post, adding that he held the opinion that the cinematic work was a “cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job.”

This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.