New York Times – He is attracting different attention, and some leading man hardware, after standout performances in “The Apprentice” and “A Different Man.”
For accompanying photo: Session #157 – Caroline Tompkins.
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For years, it seemed fair to assume that the actor Sebastian Stan could make a career on both sides of Hollywood. There was dabbling in juicy supporting roles — he played the ex-husbands of both Tonya Harding and Pamela Anderson — while comfortably returning to the action-hero part for which he is best known: Bucky Barnes. As the erstwhile sidekick of Captain America, Stan has been a regular in the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies since 2011 (including “Thunderbolts*,” which hits theaters in May). There are surely worse fates than simply maintaining that balance.
“There’s a group of actors — I’ll put Colin Farrell in this group as well — that are so handsome that in some sense it works against them,” said Jessica Chastain, Stan’s friend and castmate in “The Martian” and “The 355.”
While being too good-looking a movie star may be world’s-smallest-violin territory, a whirlwind year with two standout unconventional performances now has the 42-year-old cast in a very different light. It has also already brought in some leading-man hardware, with more maybe to come.
In the surreal comedy “A Different Man,” an actor who has a condition that distorts his facial features has a medical procedure to make himself instead look classically attractive — specifically, to look like Sebastian Stan. Stan’s gutsy subversion of his looks won him the Silver Bear for leading performance at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival and the Golden Globe for acting in a comedy or musical last month.
Sebastian Stan, an Oscar nominee for his portrayal of President Trump in “The Apprentice,” called the movie “a fresh lens on him — but also on an American truth that doesn’t always get picked apart in this way.”
The other movie, “The Apprentice,” is about a showy, morally questionable real estate mogul in 1970s and ’80s New York named Donald J. Trump. Stan plays Trump, his looks this time buried underneath both considerable physical makeup and all the figurative baggage viewers bring to the subject. From the movie’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last May, it was unclear if the film would find distribution and open in theaters, let alone be a part of awards season discussion.
But now Stan finds himself up for the Oscar in a lead acting role for playing the man who was re-elected weeks after the movie’s release, going up against four performers who have received Oscar nominations before: Adrien Brody (“The Brutalist”), Timothée Chalamet (“A Complete Unknown”), Colman Domingo (“Sing Sing”) and Ralph Fiennes (“Conclave”).
“A well-crafted character built from rage and years of suppression,” is how Stan described his character in an interview last week in Manhattan. “I would argue that even though I’m sure he’s seen the movie, maybe a few times — I have no idea by the way, this is me totally speculating — one of the issues he’s probably had with the film is it really shows you the opportunistic evolution of this person.”
After the Cannes premiere, Trump, through a spokesman, pledged to sue the filmmakers and called the movie “pure fiction” and defamatory. (Trump has not sued.)
“What I’ve always seen in his journey, and certainly what we were exploring in the film,” Stan said of “The Apprentice,” “was the solidifying of a person into stone, the loss of humanity.”Credit…Scythia Films
Major studios and streaming services, from A24 and Searchlight to Netflix and Amazon, all passed. Even after “The Apprentice” was picked up by Briarcliff Entertainment and eventually made available on platforms like Apple TV+, Amazon and YouTube, the controversy surrounding it didn’t fully subside.
The trade magazine Variety could not place Stan in its prominent “Actors on Actors” series, in which acclaimed performers interview each other during awards season, because other actors “didn’t want to talk about Donald Trump,” Variety’s co-editor in chief Ramin Setoodeh confirmed in a statement.
“I found it distressing that the business of Hollywood didn’t have the courage to support this movie,” said Stan’s “The Apprentice” co-star Jeremy Strong, who is up for best supporting actor for playing Trump’s mentor, the attorney Roy Cohn. “And I found it incredibly heartening that the community of artists and the creatives in Hollywood have acknowledged” the film with Oscar nominations.
The Trump of the first half of the movie might surprise viewers used to the 2025 version: an outer-borough scion, ambitious but unsure, who bristles under his despotic father, aspires to greater recognition and bets big on the revival of Midtown Manhattan during its 1970s nadir.
“To some extent I thrive on fear, on being told I can’t do it,” Stan said.Credit…Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times
The early Trump, whom Stan encountered in hours and hours of television interviews and documentaries he consumed while preparing for the role, really was rather different than the man who has dominated our national life for the last decade, Stan argued. “There is a dreamer there,” he said. “There is some idealism about America and New York and what it could be.”
As the ’70s turns to the 1980s, the movie’s Trump becomes far less sympathetic. Having disburdened himself of his need for a connected father-figure, he betrays Cohn, a gay man dying of AIDS. He rapes his wife, Ivana (who detailed an assault by Trump under oath but later clarified, “I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense”).
“What I’ve always seen in his journey, and certainly what we were exploring in the film,” Stan added, “was the solidifying of a person into stone, the loss of humanity.”
When Stan received the offer to play Trump three years ago, he had already branched out beyond Bucky Barnes with the roles of Jeff Gillooly, the ex-husband to Tonya Harding who plotted the violent attack on Nancy Kerrigan, in “I, Tonya,” and Tommy Lee, of Mötley Crüe and sex-tape fame, in the Hulu limited series “Pam & Tommy” — in other words, real people who dominated tabloid pages in the 1990s (and probably shared a few with Trump).
“The Marvel of it all,” Stan said, has contributed to his willingness to take on riskier roles. Bucky Barnes “allowed me to, one, have the opportunity to survive,” he explained. “But coming back to that character over time and getting to do certain things with that character allowed me to look for its core opposite.”
Even so, he said he took seriously the several people he polled for advice — a studio executive, a casting director — who advised him to say no to playing Trump. But ultimately he accepted the part, betting on artistic growth.
“He was scared,” said Chastain, who was on set with him for “The 355” when the offer came. “I said, ‘If you’re scared, you have to do it.’”
A certain defiance crept in as well. “To some extent I thrive on fear, on being told I can’t do it,” Stan said. “Probably not unlike him!”
Until recently, Stan was best known as Bucky Barnes in Marvel movies. “The Marvel of it all,” he said, has contributed to his willingness to take on riskier roles.
As Stan studied Trump, he found more common ground.
“I think everything he does is about power,” Stan said. “There were a lot of times growing up where I felt very powerless over my life.”
Stan was born in 1982 in Romania, then ruled by the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. His parents split up, and his father immigrated to California. His mother, a pianist, moved to Vienna to play and teach following Romania’s revolution in 1989. For more than a year, Stan was primarily cared for by grandparents. Then he joined his mother in Vienna, where he struggled to learn German and English.
“This Communist mentality of, ‘Don’t talk about anything, maybe they’re listening at the phone,’ was something I even felt in Vienna,” he said.
He transferred to an international school where his future stepfather was headmaster. The family eventually moved to New York.
Stan’s background was something Ali Abbasi, the Iranian filmmaker based in Denmark who directed “The Apprentice,” identified as resonant with the role of Trump, Stan said.
“Immigrants in this country are some of the most patriotic,” said Stan, who was born in Romania. “My father, when he came here, he loved America. He loved the ’80s. He loved Ronald Reagan.”
“I understood something about the script, about this person who was so desperate to get up there that he was not going to stop at anything,” Stan said.
Beyond the profundities of Trump’s motivations, Stan also set out to master the basics — the stare, the accent, the walk, the rhythm. The goal was not to do the most precise impression so much as to feel comfortable enough to forget about doing all the tics and instead live in (and improvise as) the character.
“He did such a deep dive and became a forensic detective,” said Strong, “tirelessly absorbing, observing, studying, internalizing everything he possibly could, to the point that you sort of graft it onto yourself, as if it’s a second skin, and you tip over into it.”
Stan watched many a TV interview (and there are many) on his iPad or listened through an earbud while going about his day — driving, shopping, brushing his teeth, he said. Trump’s superficialities at times led Stan back to the deeper character. “One of the things I realized was that he doesn’t breathe — it’s in the throat, it doesn’t really get into the stomach,” Stan said. At this point the obvious movie star with black hair and impressive stubble, sipping coffee quietly in a fashionable hotel lobby in white wool sweater and jeans, briefly transformed into you-know-who. “It’s more up here,” he continued. “Which is why he’s also walking the way he does — because, if you see, his posture is sort of jagged. But if you’re not breathing and you’re not in your body, you have also to think about what that does emotionally.”
“Emotionally” might be the crux of it — where an immigrant from Eastern Europe identifying with a man whose main migration was to traverse the East River from Queens to Manhattan came to see himself as different.
“Immigrants in this country are some of the most patriotic,” Stan said. “My father, when he came here, he loved America. He loved the ’80s. He loved Ronald Reagan.”
Trump, Stan argued, represents a curdling of the same American dream to which immigrants such as himself were attracted. “When you’re looking at the Trump mentality — that something terribly wrong has been done to me, and I have to overcome anything that feels weak, and generosity is actually transactional — we value people that succeed in that way in this country,” he said.
“The Apprentice,” Stan said, “was a fresh lens on him — but also on an American truth that doesn’t always get picked apart in this way.”