GQ UK -With an uncanny performance as a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice and an even less recognisable turn in A Different Man, the shapeshifting actor is embracing his freaky side.
When Sebastian Stan was growing up in Romania in the 1980s, he began to learn English through passive immersion. His mother, a concert pianist, would regularly play English music and language lessons on the family record player while they were going about their day. “I’d be playing with toys and I’d hear, like, ‘frog’ and ‘dog’, or whatever,” Stan says. It meant that by the time the actor moved to Vienna at age eight, where he attended an American international school – and later, when he moved to New York at 12 – he had a decent jumping-off point. “I’m a big believer in putting yourself in a situation where, subconsciously, there’s work being done.”
In the past two years, Stan has put that method to use in a very different way. As he entered preproduction to play Donald Trump in Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice – which charts the former President and current Republican candidate’s early rise through the New York property scene – he started spending his waking hours with tapes of the young Trump playing in his ears. He brushed his teeth with Trump, he went grocery shopping with Trump, he spoke to friends with one earphone in, Trump still nattering away in his ear. “I slept with him, by the way,” Stan says, well aware of how strange that sounds. “It just sort of ends up taking over your life.” He’s sitting somewhere in Los Angeles at lunchtime, speaking to me over Zoom, with the afternoon sun reflecting off his chlorine-blue eyes.
The Apprentice, which Stan first signed up for in 2022, explores the question, ‘How did Trump get like this?’ (The answer, it posits, has a lot to do with Roy Cohn, a lawyer and prosecutor who had risen to prominence in the 1950s as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attack dog in the communist witch-hunts.) The film is the latest in a string of freaky, transformation-heavy roles that have run parallel alongside Stan’s very mainstream 13-year-and-counting stint as Captain America’s pal Bucky Barnes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has made him a globally recognised action star. The Apprentice lands this month in the UK, two weeks after A Different Man, an A24 production in which Stan plays an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that has caused the growth of non-cancerous tumours on his face. They’re not your typical actor-in-between-superhero-outings roles – and the fact that Stan is spending so much time in the make-up chair outside of the blockbusters is indicative of a desire to get truly lost in his work.
I started to think a lot about the American dream. What is it? Is it a ghost you keep chasing?
Preparing to play Trump, he says, was like any other time he has portrayed a real-life person – take, say, Tonya Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, in I, Tonya, or Tommy Lee in Pam & Tommy. But this time around it came with an added layer of stress. “There’d be nights when my anxiety levels would be through the roof, because I’d be like, Why did I say yes to this?” he says with a laugh.
But Stan thrives when he leans into fear. He had been terrified of I, Tonya, and even more terrified of Pam & Tommy – which, in its exploration of the couple’s romance and sex tape, involved a scene where Lee converses with a silicone puppet of his penis. (The latter earned him Golden Globe and Emmy nominations.) Trump was a different beast. “I thought, I don’t know if this is doable. I don’t know if I have it in me,” he says. “But it’s not not gonna happen because I’m scared of it.”
When his mother told him he was going to be leaving Vienna for the United States at 12 years old, Stan felt like the floor had fallen from beneath him. “It was like you were telling me that my life was over,” he says. His mother was a single parent and had met an American man and fallen in love; he wanted to bring them both to live with him in New York. Stan remembers crying in the shower in the days leading up to the move. After departing Romania a few years before, he had worked hard to forge new friendships. Now, he’d have to rebuild from the bottom up again. “That did feed me resilience, because it did allow me to get better at restarting and restarting,” he says. “It fed a lot of who I am.”
Upon arriving in America, he started working on his impersonation of an American teenager. “I was so traumatised by being different,” he says. He refused to speak Romanian, even at home. He didn’t tell anyone he was from a foreign country. “I wanted to change my name to Christopher,” he says. “I wanted to be as normal in America as anybody else.” Having already set the ball rolling with his passive English lessons as a child, he was able to adopt a seamless New York accent, leaving little to betray his otherness. He tried out every personality marker available to him at school, to figure out which one fitted: debate team, forensics, every sport he could muster, and drama, eventually gravitating towards the latter. “I became popular in high school through acting,” he says. “I went on dates. I found my path.”
Still, this otherness was a part of Stan, as much as he initially tried to suppress it. As he came to appreciate life in America – in a middle-class household, with a good education – he began to reappraise his background, and felt a sense of gratitude to his stepfather for bringing them over, and for the drive it seeded within him. “This idea that you’ve been so lucky to have been selected to get this opportunity,” he says. “I was able to seize it and work with it, but on the other hand it’s a never-ending burden because you go, ‘You better not blow it!’” He remembers taking a walk through the city on their arrival, gawping up at the skyscrapers, when his mother impressed upon him that very sentiment: “You see these buildings? This is where you have a chance to become something.” He thought about this conversation quite a lot while he was playing Trump, probably because it feels like a scene ripped right out of a more varnished biography of the former President. “I started to think a lot about the American dream, and sort of like, what is it?” he says. “Is it a ghost you keep chasing?”
That was a way of me understanding that you’re just out there, like target practice.
When Stan was doing theatre in high school, he loved getting a chance to transform and become a different person entirely. “You’re 14, 15, and you’re playing parts where you have to be, like, 35 years older than you are, and you have to change your appearance, you have to change everything, and you have to walk a certain way,” he says. “That shit was fun.” He would find himself craving those meatier transformations later, after landing a run of roles in Hollywood playing traditionally hot villains and heroes in Gossip Girl and in the Captain America movies. “Watching Christian Bale do The Fighter and watching him do Batman and Vice and The Machinist… He was a guy that, to me, could have made very conventional choices because he’s very good at any of it. But then he’s trying these things.”
Opportunities like this aren’t necessarily afforded to nascent actors. In a weird way, you kind of have to wait for your face to become recognisable before you’re allowed to start messing with it. The first real taste Stan got of this was in 2017 – after he had been solidly established as a Marvel hero – in the Margot Robbie-led, Oscar-winning I, Tonya, which told the story of the assault on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, orchestrated by her Olympic rival Tonya Harding’s camp. For Harding’s ex-husband – who sets the assault in motion – they were looking for someone very different to Stan. The real Gillooly is slight and short, with narrow features. Stan felt his teen-drama looks would work against him in the audition process. “I’m like, ‘I’m gonna walk into that room and they’re gonna see the taller guy, The CW [the young-people-melodrama US TV network that first aired Gossip Girl] guy.’ I felt like I was going to be immediately judged.”
I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie saw in Stan a capacity to become Gillooly. “I was familiar with Captain America: Civil War and his work there, and I couldn’t quite picture it [at first],” Gillespie tells me. “But he actually turned up [to the audition] in the turtleneck and the moustache, almost in character. And the transformation, and his instincts tonally and comedically… He was actually improvising things in the scene that worked incredibly well.”
Gillespie was impressed not just by how Stan had remoulded himself in the shape of someone else, but by his ability to tap into the character’s humanity, too. “It has to be emotionally resonant,” he says. “You have to be able to connect to the characters… He completely commits, which is an incredibly scary proposition for an actor.” Still, Stan was filled with anxiety heading into I, Tonya. “The amount of fear I had was almost traumatising,” he says. But then he did it. “I worked so hard for that movie, and it worked.”
A DIFFERENT MAN takes things up another notch. The film was written and directed by Aaron Schimberg, a rising indie director whose work has explored how disability has impacted his life (Schimberg was born with a cleft lip and palate). In it, a prosthetics-heavy Stan plays Edward, an actor whose biggest break to date is a small role in a corporate training video about how to treat employees with facial differences in the workplace. Edward’s spirit has been crushed by the world around him, weathered by the relentless gawping of strangers and rejection. Then, he takes part in a clinical trial for a new drug that could remove the tumours from his face. It works. Edward fakes his death and adopts a new identity, looking just like regular old Sebastian Stan. But when Edward’s kind neighbour – played by The Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve – stages a play about him, he finds himself in competition with Oswald (played by Adam Pearson, a British actor with neurofibromatosis) for the part. It is, to put it mildly, a confronting drama, excavating both society’s unwillingness to treat people with disabilities fairly and the fallacy of our terminal dissatisfaction with our looks.
Though the film treads across the noir and comic horror genres, and at points tips into the absurd, it feels most like a parable. “It’s another version of the American dream, right?” Stan says. “Don’t wish for the things you want; you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
During the shoot, Stan often had long stretches between having his facial prosthetics applied and his call time (the film’s make-up designer, Michael Marino, was simultaneously working on The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, and would sometimes have to squeeze Stan into make-up in the early hours before running to that job). So Stan would walk around New York, including parts of his own neighbourhood, wearing hyperrealistic prosthetics, getting just a little taste of what his life would be like if he had been dealt a different hand. At one point, he went to his local coffee shop, where a barista he has known for years was working the counter. “She was so busy handling stuff, and suddenly she turned and she didn’t expect to see me,” he says, “and I could see the shock going immediately into overcompensation.” Pearson told him that those are the reactions that he is most often confronted with as a person with a disability: shock verging on repulsion, and guilty, over-the-top kindness.
Schimberg helped Stan to draw a neat line between Edward’s life and his own experience of fame. The one thing they had in common is how they’re observed in public spaces. “He said, ‘You have to think about what it’s like to be recognised. And the sense that you’re fair game out there.’ That I could understand,” Stan says. “I’ll go to lunch with my mom and somebody will be filming me the entire time, pretending they’re not. Or I’ll see somebody look at me strangely and then they’ll whisper to their friends. Or I’ve had someone come and tap me and run away. The invasiveness of that… And I can’t do anything but just receive it.”
Stan is quick to clarify that his experience as a famous person is not really comparable, that it comes with all sorts of upsides. But this point of similarity helped him to fully embody the character. “That was a way of me understanding this thing – that you’re just out there, like target practice.”
Production on The Apprentice was hazardously stop-start. Several times over, Stan began his Trump immersion routine – which also involved pounding Coca-Colas and peanut butter and jam sandwiches, among other things, to put on some very un-superhero bulk – only to find out that production had been suspended. At one point, the project came so close to overlapping with his next Marvel outing, next May’s Thunderbolts, that he had to start shredding instead – only for Thunderbolts to be postponed because of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Straight back to the PB&Js. All that work wasted. “I’m fuckin’ 41; I just worked pretty hard to get in shape here!” he says.
Stan’s Trump is admirably nuanced, particularly for a person who has been so widely imitated – on SNL, on late-night talk shows, every second of every day by comedians trying to make a name for themselves on TikTok – as to be reduced to a caricature in the public consciousness. Initially, it feels quite removed, but then you spot the shape his mouth curves into while enunciating words like “deal” and “loser”, a subtle pursing of the lips when he’s being spoken to, a hand gesture. As the movie progresses, the man with whom we’re all exhaustingly familiar comes closer and closer to the fore.
The challenge, in Stan’s eyes, was to tread the very fine line between interpretation and imitation. “It’s a balance between having the familiarity without it becoming sort of a schtick,” he says. “There is a small window of time where you are going through the impersonation phase, because you’ve got to get through that in order to come out the other end,” he says. “There is a mechanical, technical piece to it, and that comes from actually studying a person.” According to Stan’s mother, he spent much of his childhood relentlessly impersonating people he came in to contact with. “I’ve always been good at watching people,” he says.
I’m going to commit the fuck out of it and surrender myself to the story.
Once he got comfortable enough, he would take the show on the road – trying versions of the character out in restaurants to see if anyone would pick up on it. “Because there’s a thing getting born,” he says, “and you want to test it out in the world, but you don’t want to overdo it too quickly – then it gets frozen.” No one seemed to notice in the moment, which was at least some indication that he hadn’t tipped over into parody, but some friends who have seen the movie realised retrospectively: “They’ve come up to me after and said, ‘Now I see this fuckin’ weird thing you were doing!’”
When we meet Trump in The Apprentice, he is a footsoldier in his father’s company and significantly less self-assured, though he’s got the trademark wispy hair and the ill-fitting suits. The wheels begin to turn when he meets Cohn – portrayed here in typically committed fashion by Succession’s Jeremy Strong, with whom Stan only had the chance to interact in character on set – who begins to sculpt Trump in his own image, laying out his rules for success, which will be very familiar to anyone who has paid attention to Trump’s political career: 1) attack, attack, attack; 2) admit nothing and deny everything; and 3) always claim victory and never admit defeat.
Stan seems reticent to get into the politics of The Apprentice, which depicts Trump as, among other things, a rapist, in a scene referencing allegations made in a deposition by his first wife Ivana during their divorce proceedings. (Trump has previously denied the rape allegation; Ivana later issued a statement clarifying that she had felt violated, but was not raped in a “literal or criminal sense”.) But the movie speaks for itself. And Trump’s camp is already speaking back: after the film premiered at Cannes in May, the presidential campaign’s chief spokesperson Steven Cheung called the movie “garbage”, “pure fiction” and “election interference by Hollywood elites”, while also threatening a lawsuit. In a press conference at the film festival, Abbasi suggested that an ideal release date would be in mid-September, to align with the second presidential debate (but the film, as it happens, is now due out on 11 October in the USA, and 18 October in the UK). It wouldn’t take Alan Turing to decipher the message being transmitted. But I try and press for a direct answer: does Stan feel an added sense of responsibility playing Trump in an election year? “You can’t not think about it,” he says. “But I had tremendous trust in Ali Abbasi and his vision for the movie. And it is an important story – I think the movie makes a great attempt at exploring: how did we get here? But I approached it with the same responsibility as I approached anything I ever got involved with, which is, I’m going to give this my all. I’m going to research the fuck out of it; I’m going to commit the fuck out of it and surrender myself to the story.”
Does he have any concerns about backlash from Trump or from MAGA supporters? “I mean, is there anything out there now that doesn’t get backlash? You can’t worry about what people think,” Stan says. “But I’m fully aware that I’m doing things that are not going to be for everybody.”
He’s not far off the mark. Even Marvel, the world’s highest-grossing movie franchise of all time, has faced quite a bit of criticism in recent years – in part for the way in which they’ve handled the transition to a new set of heroes and storylines since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. Stan doesn’t have any time for it. “I’ve never been part of a company that puts so much heart and thought into anything,” he says. “I think if Marvel was gone, it’d be such a big hole to try and fill up. Don’t just go out there and shit on something without offering something better.”
He’s certainly not done with the MCU yet. Thunderbolts, which he’ll headline alongside Florence Pugh, will arrive in May next year. And he’s already looking beyond that, to a potential reunion with Robert Downey Jr, who has been announced to return in the next Avengers movie – not as Iron Man, but as the villain Doctor Doom. “I hope I’m in a scene with him,” Stan says. “Is there any other guy that could pull that off? I don’t know, probably not. After Tropic Thunder, is there anything that guy can’t do?” he says, laughing. It is perhaps the movie that I least expect Stan – or anyone, to be honest – to reference in 2024, but I should know better. Downey Jr is a transformation master, too. Game recognises game.
Trump doesn’t exist in the Marvel universe – or at least not yet – but if you spot a hint of him in Thunderbolts, you’ll know why. “I went off to Marvel after [The Apprentice],” Stan says. “And we were doing scenes, and I would do something, a thing or two, and be like, ‘Fuck! This is still living somewhere.’”