Sebastian Stan has admitted he lost out on sleep while preparing to play Donald Trump in a new movie.

The Emmy nominee portrays the ex-president in the new film The Apprentice, which centres around the early years of Trump’s business career in the late 70s and 80s.

Opening up about how he got into character, Sebastian told Today: “Well, [you] try to get sleep, which I didn’t. There’s a lot of research out there, there’s a lot of footage and documentaries.

“It’s pretty much been very well-documented, his sort of rise into what we see today. And to me, it’s like playing an instrument. You sit at the piano, you get better at it with practice, and eventually you can just kinda do it in your sleep.”

Sebastian opened up about his intense creative process during an interview with Variety published last week.

“I had 130 videos on his physicality on my phone,” he recalled. “And 562 videos that I had pulled with pictures from different time periods – from the ’70s all the way to today – so I could pull out his speech patterns and try to improvise like him.”

He added: “Every night I would go home and try not only to prepare for the day that was coming, but also to prepare for where Ali [Abbasi, the director of The Apprentice] was going to take this.”

Sebastian also revealed to Variety that he gained more than a stone in the space of two months to play Trump in the film.

The Apprentice was largely well-received when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

It has also already come under fire from Trump’s presidential campaign, who said it belongs “in a dumpster fire” and “doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store”.