The Apprentice director Ali Abbasi has reportedly been dropped by his American representatives after allegedly groping an A-list star.
The 44-year-old filmmaker has parted ways with his agents at talent agency CAA and his management at Entertainment360.
According to Deadline, the incident occurred at a party at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont following the Golden Globes. Sources claimed Abbasi “aggressively groped an A-list, CAA-repped actor” and was let go by his representatives in the aftermath.
The Independent has approached CAA, Entertainment360 and Abbasi’s UK representatives for comment.
Controversial Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice had been nominated for two awards at the Golden Globes, with Sebastian Stan up for Best Actor and Jeremy Strong competing for Best Supporting Actor.
Stan plays Trump, while Succession star Strong plays his mentor, the lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn. Both men are also nominated in the same categories at next month’s Academy Awards.
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May last year but subsequently struggled to find a distributor in the United States as Donald Trump’s attorneys sent out a cease and desist letter to producers seeking to prevent it from being released.
In a statement to The Independent at the time, Trump campaign chief spokesperson Steven Cheung said: “We filed a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”
He added: “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked. As with the illegal Biden trials, this is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked. This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should not see the light of day.”
In a three-star review of The Apprentice for The Independent, critic Clarisse Loughrey wrote: “The Apprentice’s most effective takedown of Donald Trump is how unremarkable it makes him seem. This may render Ali Abbasi’s portrait of the early days of the former president and current presidential candidate a little monotonous, but it makes its point succinctly.”
She added: “A direct line is drawn from Richard Nixon, with his ‘I’m not a crook’ address, to attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), and on to Trump (Sebastian Stan), who he [Cohn] both represented and mentored in the early Seventies.”
