“That’s his fucking shit-bag apartment”: the Al Pacino movie shot inside Donald Trump’s house
No movie has ever been allowed to film inside of Donald Trump’s current residence, because it’s the White House, but long before he set his sights on political office, he opened his doors to Hollywood.
No stranger to Tinseltown, having popped up everywhere from The Jeffersons and Two Weeks Notice to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and The Little Rascals, the former reality TV host granted permission to many productions to set up shop in premises he owned.
Home Alone 2 is the most famous example, but what’s lesser-known is that when a crew was looking for the perfect apartment to house a wealthy degenerate and real estate magnate accused of murdering their wife, stepson, and maid, they found the perfect backdrop in New York City’s Trump Tower.
Not just any apartment, though, but Trump’s actual residence in the Fifth Avenue building. Al Pacino may have devoured every inch of the scenery in Taylor Hackford’s The Devil’s Advocate, but for screenwriter Tony Gilroy, his most memorable experience was how oblivious the WWE Hall of Famer was to the suitability of his home to double for a killer’s lair.
“Oh, my god. The Trump shit. Fuck man, it’s his apartment,” Gilroy explained. “The killer real-estate molester? We shot in his apartment. We needed the ugliest, most garish, horrifying real-estate developer apartment we could possibly find, and Trump threw his apartment at us. We didn’t have to do anything.”
The Devil’s Advocate had a specific set of criteria that it wanted to fulfil in order to present Craig T Nelson’s Alexander Cullen as the reprehensible murderer that he was, and it was handed to them on a plate. Or, as Gilroy put it, “That’s his fucking shit-bag apartment with all Versailles gilt and the high-rise windows; it’s just so perfect.”
Echoing similar stories told by Home Alone 2 director Chris Columbus, Trump seemed to be a big fan of hanging around the set on the supernatural legal thriller, too. “He came by the set every day because he was living there,” Gilroy added. “He’d come by the set and poke around. He was a clown.”
Doubling down on his perception of the eventual commander-in-chief, the future Andor creator summed him up as “that grifter, clown, kind of loser outsider, pretend rich guy,” one who also apparently made a habit of timing his set visits to hopefully coincide with some scenes involving the film’s female lead.
“He would come by on the way to the office, peek by, and try to see Charlize,” Gilroy claimed, with Theron playing the wife of Keanu Reeves’ Kevin Lomax. “Everyone was laughing at him, laughing at his apartment.” The Devil’s Advocate sees Pacino hamming it up way past 11, but the production designers found their lives made much easier when the most garish apartment they could ever hope to find was volunteered for use by the guy who lived there, Donald Trump.
