The Apprentice: Writing The Antihero

Excerpt: “This episode, we are going to be talking about The Apprentice, the 2024 film written by Gabriel Sherman, directed by Ali Abbasi, and starring my dear friend Sebastian Stan, who was just nominated for an Academy Award (so proud of you, Sebastian!), playing Donald Trump and Jeremy Strong playing his mentor, Roy Cohn. We're going to be looking at The Apprentice not through a political lens. (If you've been listening to this podcast, my feelings about the current administration have been made extremely clear).  Rather, we're going to be looking at The Apprentice through a screenwriting lens. We're going to be talking about adapting true life stories, and more importantly, we're going to be talking about how to write a villain. How to write an antihero, how to write a “bad guy” with whom audiences can connect. One of the things that's really interesting about this film is that both of its main characters, (at least from the point of view of the writer/director) are antiheroes. Donald Trump is an antihero. He is a character on a progression into depravity. And Roy Cohn, his mentor, is an anti hero, an already depraved human being, bringing up a new mentee in his image.In this way, The Apprentice has a similar structure to really complicated, beautiful French-Algerian movie called A Prophet, which also focuses on a really complicated father-son relationship between twisted mentor and a troubled mentee. To accomplish this, and write complicated characters we as an audience could connect to, and that great actors like Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong would want to play, Gabriel Sherman had to set his own political beliefs aside, and find the humanity in both characters.  So that’s what we’re going to be talking about in this podcast. How to wrestle with your own political beliefs and your own judgment of your characters, even if you’re writing characters who do things that you consider depraved…” For writers, The Apprentice is a reminder that even our darkest characters aren't just collections of traits, but people driven by fundamental emotional needs that we all share. And that sometimes the most politically powerful films grow from finding empathy, even for those we consider our enemies. In this podcast, you’ll learn how to build this kind of empathy for your own characters, as well as: * How to write three-dimensional villains and antagonists * Character transformation through mentor relationships * Writing morally grey characters and antiheroes * Techniques for building audience empathy * Structuring moral descent character arcs * Making unlikeable characters compelling * Character psychology in screenplay development * Emotional motivation techniques * Methods for revealing character complexity * Writing authentic relationship dynamics * Building compelling mentor-mentee relationships * Balancing humanity with darkness * Creating character transformation through rules