It’s the noise living in all of our heads—when we turn on the news, scroll through Elon Musk’s X, or listen to any number of podcasts. Donald Trump’s
It’s the noise living in all of our heads—when we turn on the news, scroll through Elon Musk’s X, or listen to any number of podcasts. Donald Trump’s voice even forced its way into awards season with The Apprentice, which fictionalizes the president’s ascent in the New York City real estate scene in the 1970s and ’80s. Despite a long and arduous battle for distribution, the film earned a pair of Oscar nominations: one for Sebastian Stan’s lead performance as Trump, and the other for Jeremy Strong’s supporting turn as his shadowy mentor, Roy Cohn.
Stan’s performance is made not just by his sideswept blonde wig and perpetually pouted lips, but his total mastery of Trump’s idiosyncratic diction. For that, we can thank dialect coach Liz Himelstein, who has devoted her life to helping performers find characters through accent. That means phonetically breaking down dialogue—every vowel, diphthong, and consonant change—in addition to giving her high-profile clients primary source material they can study.
The key to Stan’s transformation turned out to be Trump’s 1980 conversation with gossip columnist Rona Barrett. “In that interview, we found so much of him,” Himelstein tells Vanity Fair, speaking in the soothing, perfectly enunciated tone one would expect from a person who teaches accents for a living. “It was a treasure trove of sounds and cadence, and also [Trump] being 34 years old, his younger voice.”
As Stan previously told VF, in the appearance, Trump “speaks very quickly, very passionately, very eloquently, persuasively even—well thought-out, running sentences”—with a lot more coherence than he manages these days. At this point in his story, Trump also had yet to develop his signature braggadocio. “He was slightly shy with Rona. I mean very slightly,” says Himelstein. “But with the tutelage of Roy Cohn, he felt like he could be a little bit bigger and much more confident.”
Trump’s speaking style has changed over the years, partly due to his age. But Himelstein also sees another shift: “I think that he, in some ways, became a parody of himself. The way that he says things has gotten certain reactions. So he goes right for those types of phrases. He’s definitely not that fast-talking, thinking ahead human being that he used to be in his thirties, and I think that he’s lost some language skills if you really listen to him.” His current audience often focuses more on how he speaks than what he says, I offer. “Exactly,” she replies. “‘They’re eating the dogs and the cats,’ all of that—you’d never hear that in a 1980s Donald.”
While working with Stan, Himelstein wrote out all of the dialogue from the Barrett interview, as well as some of Trump’s early appearances with Oprah Winfrey and Mike Wallace, and had the actor memorize it. She also gave Stan audio from Fred Trump, who passed his Queens, New York accent down to his son Donald. Both Stan and Himelstein spent months with Trump’s voice in their ear—and saw the lines between the two men blurring in the process. “As we kept working and working and working, when we’d go back to some of the interviews, it would seem to me like Trump was imitating Sebastian,” says Himelstein. “The tables had turned. ‘God, he almost sounds like you,’” she remembered thinking. “We could not believe it.”
Himelstein’s more than three-decade career in Hollywood dates back to 1990’s Cry-Baby, a musical romantic comedy from John Waters starring a then fresh-faced Johnny Depp. She got her start teaching theater students at SUNY Purchase and Carnegie Mellon before bringing her talent to a crop of youthful screen actors who needed to nail a Baltimore accent. Himelstein’s filmography is teeming with equally compelling credits, from The Big Lebowski to Man of Steel. She’s coached everyone from Mike Myers’s Cat in the Hat to Emma Stone’s Billie Jean King. She is an “absolute ninja” at teaching performers the Minnesotan accents in 1996’s Fargo and its subsequent TV spinoff. And her expertise often gets her repeat clients like Naomi Watts, Margot Robbie, Andrew Garfield, and, most prolifically, Nicole Kidman, with whom she’s worked on 24 projects to date—spanning from 1996’s The Portrait of a Lady to 2021’s Nine Perfect Strangers.
Before The Apprentice, Himelstein had already coached Stan for his roles as two other larger-than-life characters: Tonya Harding’s Oregon-accented ex-husband Jeff Gillooly in I, Tonya and California-bred rocker Tommy Lee in Pam & Tommy. “Sebastian went to drama school at Rutgers. He had taken voice and speech class; he understood the mechanics. And that was really wonderful because we could just jump right into it,” says Himelstein. “Sebastian, always with everything we’ve ever worked on, is so committed, works beyond anything you could imagine, and has a marvelous ear. So it’s always a very exciting process working with him.”
Her established relationship with Stan sold Himelstein on The Apprentice—as did her mighty belief in its imaginative team, director Ali Abassi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman (who is also a Vanity Fair special correspondent). “I didn’t feel any nervousness at all. I loved the script. It was so brilliant, so well-written,” she says. The filmmakers explained their approach to her this way: “We’re going to do a little bit of rock and roll.” Says Himelstein, “I was ready for it. And as you can see, it’s not a Lifetime movie, right?”
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