CANNES, France — A lawyer for former president Donald Trump has accused the filmmakers of “The Apprentice” of defamation and illegal election interference in a cease and desist letter obtained by The Washington Post. The docudrama, which premiered to a huge standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday, stars Sebastian Stan as the future president and tracks Trump’s rise to power and malevolence as a New York real estate mogul in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It depicts Trump as a rapist, and has been broadly attacked by the former president’s lawyers as a politically-motivated fabrication.

“The Movie presents itself as a factual biography of Mr. Trump, yet nothing could be further from the truth,” Trump attorney David A. Warrington wrote in the letter, sent Wednesday to the film’s director and writer.

“It is a concoction of lies that repeatedly defames President Trump and constitutes direct foreign interference in America’s elections.” A film still of The Apprentice, which premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Mongrel Media/Cannes Film Festival Much of the three-page letter is spent attacking people involved with the movie for previous statements about Trump.

It notes that Jeremy Strong, who plays Trump’s old political fixer Roy Cohn, compared the former president’s rhetoric to that of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Joseph Goebbels in a statement from the actor that director Ali Abbasi read aloud at a Cannes news conference. It accuses screen.