Check out Sebastian’s interview in full over at TheWrap.com!
Marvel Studios is known for its secrecy — both among fans, and the stars of the movies themselves.
Take Sebastian Stan, for instance. He landed the crucial role of Bucky Barnes, the best friend of Steve Rogers, in 2011’s first “Captain America” film. The movie ended with Bucky presumed dead, but with the actor signed to a nine-picture deal and the comics providing plenty of roadmaps for the character’s future, it was pretty obvious to everyone that his fall in “The First Avenger” would not be the last we heard from Stan or his character.
Common wisdom aside, however, no one knew exactly how Barnes would return — include Stan himself.
“I knew about the storyline of the character, and kind of what happens in the comic books; they educated me on the character when we started discussing him, but everything was sort of ‘Knock on wood, if things go well, we’ll see how it goes,’” Stan told TheWrap, referring to the uncertainty surrounding the future of his big screen alter-ego.
As it turns out, the actor found out that Barnes would come back as the villainous Winter Soldier — an amnesiac Soviet assassin — “about two years after we shot the first film,” he said.
So Stan did some recon work himself, working off clues he found both in the comics and in the initial script for the first film. He also did his best not to worry about how the other Marvel films would or could impact his own — even if it boasted crossover stars like Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury) and Cobie Smulders (Maria Hill).
He was just excited to be working with them, he said, and got himself ready to go when the call came.
“When you have a lineage of books to turn to, you can kind of find cool character stuff that you hope to kind of bring into the movie if there’s an opportunity,” Stan said.
“Some things just don’t translate very well from the page to the screen, and sometimes they need to be kind of revised a little bit, just to make more sense, so that’s why, at least in this case, Bucky Barnes from the beginning of the movies was never that teenage sidekick that you saw in the comic books … They really wanted it to have a different dynamic and friendship and that was from the start in the screenplays.”
Also helpful: Talking with the person that created the character of The Winter Soldier in the first place.