Paul Walter Hauser volunteers for Actors on Actors with Sebastian Stan after everyone else refused

All of the other actors' reps were "too afraid" to talk about The Apprentice, Stan said.

By Emma Keates  |  November 20, 2024 | 12:07pm
Photo: Jimmy Kimmel Live/YouTube; Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images for CMT
Film News The Apprentice
Paul Walter Hauser volunteers for Actors on Actors with Sebastian Stan after everyone else refused
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The impact of this election is already being felt across multiple industries, in ways both extremely predictable and some less so. Sebastian Stan’s inability to find a partner for Variety‘s Actors on Actors interview series, for example, falls into that second category. “I couldn’t find another actor to do it with me because they were too afraid to go and talk about this movie,” Stan said during a recent screening of his Donald Trump biopic, The Apprentice. 

While this may seem like a pithy issue on the surface, it gestures at something far more sinister going on in entertainment and the culture at large. Stan emphasized that he wasn’t pointing fingers at anyone specific; he couldn’t even “get past the publicists or the people representing” the actors, because they were too anxious to get wrapped up in discourse about the president-elect. The same forces that stopped people from signing up to sit across from him likely also had a hand in Rachel Zegler’s apology for posting “Fuck Donald Trump” on her Instagram story, for example.

“That’s when I think we lose the situation,” Stan continued. “Because if it really becomes like that—fear or that discomfort to talk about this—then we’re really going to have a problem.” 

Luckily, the courageous Paul Walter Hauser seems to have no such qualms. “I’ll do it?” he posted on Twitter (X) last night in response to the news about Stan. Seeing as the Apprentice star was apparently supposed to go on the Variety series this coming Friday, the interview likely won’t actually happen. Still, it’s good to know that there are at least two people out there still willing to stick it to the man—or, at the very least, discuss him in a public forum.

Even if it doesn’t happen, Stan had some more pearls of wisdom to share at the screening. The actor went on to cite Carlos Lozada’s recent New York Times op-ed “Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are,” in which the author writes, “There have been so many attempts to explain away Trump’s hold on the nation’s politics and cultural imagination, to reinterpret him as aberrant and temporary. ‘Normalizing’ Trump became an affront to good taste, to norms, to the American experiment.” 

“That’s the only way you’re going to grasp this film,” Stan continued. “All it’s saying is, ‘You cannot keep casting this person aside, especially after they get the popular vote.’ Should we not give this a closer look and try to understand what it is about this person that’s even driving that?”

 
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