How ‘The Apprentice’ Filmed the Trump Liposuction Scene

In Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, there is a scene where Donald Trump (played by Sebastian Stan) gets a hair transplant to remove a bald spot, as well as liposuction to make him look thinner.

The film follows Trump as he starts out as a local real estate developer in the 1970s to become a national celebrity in the 1980s. He learns the power game from Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), a ruthless and hedonistic political fixer. Head of Hair Michelle Cote, along with Head of Prosthetics Sean Sansom and Brandi Boulet, were the artisans responsible for Stan’s transformation into Trump and helping to bring the series to completion.

As time goes on, Trump begins to lose his hair and gain weight to the point where he takes amphetamines to help him lose weight. But it doesn’t work.

Stan gained 15 pounds for the role to mirror Trump’s body transformation. the costume department also made a padded suit with a prosthetic belly. “Any of the scenes where his shirt was open or his robe was open, we would put the fake piece on him,” says Boulet. The team used the prosthetic belly for a look they nicknamed “Pills Donny”.

“We had a fake belly that we made for Sebastian for part of his ‘Pills Donny’ look, which was my favorite because he was all red, blotchy, always eating and sweaty and a little scruffy,” Boulet explains.

Because of his hair loss and weight gain, Trump resorts to plastic surgery in the film. For the hair transplant scene, Sansom reveals they used “the top of a fake head with scalp. Michelle had a toupee and an area where the scalp was removed was cut. The hair was struck a hair at a time, and the piece was rigged with a line of blood, and the scalpel also had a line of blood—and it was shot in a day.’

When the audience is first introduced to Trump, he is much younger, so Boule used prosthetic lift pieces on Stan’s face. “We pulled his cheeks and eyes up and tightened his face to make him look younger,” Boulet explains, adding that “for the skin tone, we had him a little lighter than the classic orange you see in end”.

Cote even gave Stan a blonde wig with medium side bangs for that early Trump phase. But it was an evolving look, with his eyebrows, hair and skin tone changing over time. “When he was younger, his hair was golden because he was out more and had some natural highlights,” Cote explains. “As he grew older, he lost his highlights and [his hair] it got darker.”

To capture Trump’s aging, Bullet would take down Stan’s lifting pieces. Cheeks were then added to ‘bury’ the actor’s sculpted face and defined cheekbones. “He had an upper dental plaque that didn’t cover his teeth. They were lumps under his lips pushing it [mouth] area further out so it was flatter,” explains Samson. “And they put them on his lower lip to give him that nose-down Donald look.”

One challenge the team had to deal with was Stan’s facial hair. With shoots all day long, Stan’s facial hair would start to emerge, which meant constant touch-ups were necessary. “He’s got a five o’clock shadow the minute he starts shaving. So we had to work with little things like that, where we would have to cover it and combine the prosthetic.”

Makeup artist Colin Penman remembers being mesmerized while watching the screen as Stan and Maria Bakalova, who plays Ivana Trump, recreated Oprah Winfrey’s 1988 interview. “I knew we had something because there’s this fine line where we don’t want to make a parody. We want it to be real,” he says.

Aside from gaining weight, Stan came fully prepared to perform and capture the essence of the former president. “The production had set aside a large archive of reference videos and photos that everyone was using,” says Sansom. “We were trying to recreate and reproduce some of the photos as best we could.”

Boulet adds, “Sebastian had everything. His phone was full of research. He would come in the morning and study and watch videos.”