You can read Sebastian’s interview in full over at MovieWeb.com
Going into Captain America: The First Avenger, I have to imagine you were hoping to get a chance to play Winter Soldier. Were they ever discussing plans for that during the first movie, or did they come to you with the story much later?
Sebastian Stan: The whole story was brought to me before we shot the first movie. I didn’t really know where they were going to take the sequel next, or even if we were going to have a sequel, at the time. We were still making the movie, which is why when people start talking about the next film now, it’s the same thing. The movie has to come out, so I didn’t really know, at all. In the script, there were certain things about Bucky Barnes, he wasn’t written linear. There were peaks and valleys and some dark undertones, and that kind of made me feel like this is a chance to show various colors of things, depending on how it’s going to go.
I read you really embraced the training aspects of this, especially with the knives. Even before I saw the movie, that knife fight part in the trailer was one of the coolest things I had seen in awhile.
Sebastian Stan: Yeah, you’ve got to credit our stunt guys. I had this amazing stuntman, James Young, and he was teaching me everything, in terms of the knife training. Yeah, we got into it, because we had the time and we really wanted to get it. It was fun. I mean, Chris (Evans) had been in a number of action movies, but I don’t think any of us had learned this type of sequenced, choreographed type of fighting. This was something that, if there was a shot that would take three minutes, we would break it up and it took awhile. We took advantage of trying to do as much as we could.
The Winter Soldier’s look is so menacing and awesome, and you know right away this guy is bad. It was like one of those Darth Vader moments, where you see this guy and you know he’s the real deal. Can you talk about the actual costume you had to wear and the arm. Was there a lot of bulk to it, or were you still able to move around in it rather well?
Sebastian Stan: There was a lot of bulk to it. The way that the costume came together is it was made from five different pieces, and flexibility was definitely an issues, one we couldn’t have really known, because we weren’t rehearsing with the costumes on. We just saw how flexible we were once we got on set. It was tough. We went through some periods where we ripped a bunch of the costumes, just flying by the seat of your pants, a little bit. The arm was very specific. There were a couple of them, some more mobile than others. The ones that were more immobile were actually the better looking ones that looked cooler, so I always wanted to have that one. By the end, we just really adjusted to that.