Gold Derby

Even if he tried, Sebastian Stan couldn’t have avoided thinking about getting not one but two Golden Globe nominations. The actor, who received bids for A Different Man and The Apprentice, was at a screening for the former the night before the announcement.

“People were just like, ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,’” he recalls on this week’s episode of Awards Magnet. “It was a very surreal experience, but I was I was very grateful to obviously even be there once. And particularly with The Apprentice, it was even maybe more surprising because I just never know what to expect with that one.”

Stan is nominated for Best Comedy/Musical Actor for his turn as an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis in A Different Man — for which he won the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin Film Festival — and for Best Drama Actor for playing a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice. He’s the first actor to score nominations in these categories since Ryan Gosling achieved it in 2012 with Crazy, Stupid, Love and The Ides of March.

While Aaron Schimberg‘s A Different Man, which Stan filmed in 2022, was delayed because of the Hollywood strikes, The Apprentice, which also netted a supporting actor bid for Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, faced an even steeper uphill battle from the beginning. The project had been in development for years before finally going into production a year ago. Detractors felt it’s too soon for a Trump film, especially in an election year. Despite getting good reviews at the Cannes Film Festival, the film, directed by Ali Abbasi, struggled to find a distributor as Trump’s team threatened legal action before Briarcliff Entertainment stepped up.

“I feel like Ali Abbasi — kind of the way he shot it and the way he’s made the film – it’s really kind of maybe the best version of what that film could have been, given all of the circumstances and the subject matter and everything,” Stan says. “So, even like both of us [nominated] was a big gratifying moment, obviously, because I feel so connected with him.”

Last month, Stan went viral after he revealed during a Q&A that he was unable to participate in our sister site Variety’s Actors on Actors because publicists did not want their clients to discuss Trump. Stan says he brought up “the Variety thing” in the Q&A to make a larger point about fear, adding that multiple distributors loved The Apprentice but were reluctant to pick it up.

“I guess there’s always been fear around movies … but this time it sort of feels obviously more raw because it’s all happening in real time. This movie is not a film that waited 10 years when we all got good and comfortable to look at [and question] choices we’ve made,” he says. “We’re being challenged to not be indifferent in a time where, for survival — mental and emotional — we’re leaning towards being indifferent. I think that’s the difficulty around it. And what we’ve been trying to talk about was that regardless of your point of view of the subject or him or whatever, or how you grew up or where you’re from, there is still the benefit of having an experience with a movie, which is what a movie is supposed to do. … You can go and have your own experience with this person for two hours, and there is an instinct there that you may have as a human being that will override whatever else.”

Earlier this month, the actor shared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that Steven Spielberg told him at the Governors Awards that he loved his performances in both films. “Other people, other actors” have expressed love and admiration for The Apprentice specifically in private to Stan, and he hopes nominations from the Golden Globes and the Independent Spirit Awards will give people “permission to just acknowledge the movie publicly.”

“Not only do we feel like it turned out the best it could have happened with what we were dealing with circumstantially, but then it does get validated when you get text messages and emails that your agents are forwarding you from people you’ve grown up with admiring that are like, ‘Hey, I just want to tell you this is my favorite thing I’ve seen,’” he says. “I don’t know if this will, in 10 years’ time, as we’ve had a moment in a distance to kind of look at it again, maybe it will be considered, but I do feel it will be talked about.”