Category: Articles

Sep

‘I, Tonya’ Star Sebastian Stan on Why Tonya Harding Might Be a Hero

The new film I, Tonya, which made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend, sees Margot Robbie step into the notorious skates of infamous American figure skater Tonya Harding, who in 1994 made the U.S. Olympic team after her rival, Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed in the knee in a plot masterminded by Harding’s ex-husband Jeff Gillooly. Harding’s level of involvement or knowledge beforehand has always been up for debate, though she was ultimately banned from figure skating for life; Gillooly, however, emerged as the real creep of the ordeal, especially once Tonya revealed he’d been physically abusive to her throughout their marriage.

I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) presents the events of Harding’s life as a kind of ludicrous and darkly comedic story, with Margot Robbie playing Harding as both trashy and defiant, an athletic wonder and also a habitual liar, plagued by toxic relationships with her mother (an excellent Allison Janney) and later her husband, played with pathetic aggression but also an undercurrent of pure infatuation by Sebastian Stan. Stan is likely best known for his role in the Marvel movies as Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier, but his career has spanned from Gossip Girl to underrated TV gems like NBC’s ill-fated Kings and USA’s Political Animals to films like Ricki and the Flash, The Martian, and The Bronze, where he played a hyper-competitive gymnastics coach with his eyes on the Olympics. This summer, he co-starred in Steven Soderbergh’s phenomenally fun Logan Lucky.

Stan took a moment in Toronto this weekend to sit with Decider and discuss playing Gillooly, the appeal of the Olympics at the movies, and why Tonya Harding just might be a hero if you look at it a certain way.

Decider.com: This is your first time playing a real-life character in a movie?

Sebastian Stan: Yes, it was.

Was that a little daunting?

100%, yeah. It feels like you have someone’s life in your hands, in a way.

I feel like you’re around the same age as me, and I remember watching that whole Olympics and all the controversy around it; do you remember watching it back then?

I watched it very, very, very briefly. But then I caught up with it again when 30 for 30 did that great documentary [The Price of Gold]. And then doing research on this, I really got into it. It’s just a wild time.

That was my next question, actually: were you all encouraged to watch the 30 for 30 or the NBC documentary [Nancy & Tonya]? How much did they want you looking at footage of your characters?

Yeah, they wanted to, but mostly Craig [Gillespie] left me to decide. He said if you want to meet [Jeff Gillooly], meet him. If you don’t want to meet him, you don’t have to. And I was like yeah, I’d love to meet him. And it was great to meet him, because I didn’t have enough footage of him from the present day. It was great to see him now, especially if I was going to try to play him at an older age.

What was your impression of him?

Again, you’re always walking in there with a preconceived idea. And I’d watched so much, over and over and over again, so just seeing him, it was like, “HEY!” I was actually really excited, because I’d spent so much time with him already. And he was very cool with it, he was like, “Hey, what’s going on?” And I was like, I’ve gotta calm down I guess. But yeah, it was surreal; I think there’s a lot more to the story than people think. And that’s what our movie does is try to point that way and get you to look at it a little differently. And it’s bizarre, but in the end, I wanted to see him and how he talked and acted. It was good.

What are the challenges of playing somebody who is on the surface pretty despicable, and then finding something both human and also funny in there?

Well all those things were in the script, that’s what was easy. But it was all laid there as it was, and then Craig coming in and really getting it down. It seems like he knew the very balance of how far to take it. And I think when you see the movie, you see that he’s done it very cleverly in terms of giving a mix of all the right things. Yeah, it’s crazy, man. I think we had to commit ourselves to what was on the page, and at the same time really keep an objective, bird’s-eye-view of safety and being able to trust each other. And Margot, it was very easy with Margot. You know, she was very committed, she wanted to go the distance, and we trusted each other. And sometimes we laughed and sometimes we’d go “Are you okay?” you know, checking in. And by the end we managed very well. Continue reading

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Published by Carol

Published on Sep 11, 2017

Articles I Tonya Interviews Press

Sep

BuzzFeed: Sebastian Stan Wouldn’t Tell Me If His ‘I, Tonya’ Mustache Was Real And I’m Spiraling

Margot Robbie stars as Harding…

…Allison Janney stars as LaVona Golden, Harding’s abusive mother…

…and Sebastian Stan plays Jeff Gillooly, Harding’s equally abusive ex-husband and alleged co-conspirator in the attack on Kerrigan.

Now, I know there’s only one question on your mind: Did Sebastian Stan really grow that iconic Jeff Gillooly-level mustache for this role?

Well, get ready for the journey of a lifetime. I spoke with Stan the morning after I, Tonya premiered at TIFF, and it basically turned into a cold case file.
As soon as I brought it up, Stan said quietly, “Ahh, the mustache.” He smiled. “The mustache may or may not be mine.”

“I’ll tell you this,” he continued, and then paused, choosing his words carefully. “I had a mustache for the audition. I had a mustache for…here, I’ll show you a photo.”

He grabbed his phone and pulled up a selfie in which he was in his Jeff Giloolly costume making a funny face — and he had a mustache that was definitely his and looked a lot like the one he had in the movie.

“I had a mustache for some of the time filming in Atlanta, which proved to be interesting,” he said cryptically, like a very wise but mischievous wizard with a secret. “We had to alter it at times because of the fact that [Jeff] ages [in the film], but yeah, I did for as long as I could.”

The one and only thing we know for sure is that Jeff Giloolly himself officially approved of the ‘stache. “I posted one time when I was on set, and [Jeff Giloolly] wrote to me and he said, ‘You might have actually made that mustache look cool for once,'” Stan said.

Sebastian Stan’s mustache, you riddle, I will solve you.

Source: buzzfeed.com

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Published by Carol

Published on Sep 11, 2017

Articles

Sep

Margot Robbie’s Favorite Moment in ‘I, Tonya’ Was When She Actually Punched Sebastian Stan in the Head

It might be best to stay out of Margot Robbie’s way when she’s in character. She may not have known at first that her character, Tonya Harding, was a real person, but while on set — as she told the audience after the Toronto Film Festival premiere of I, Tonya — sometimes she got so into playing Harding that she forgot she wasn’t actually in a volatile, violent relationship with Sebastian Stan’s Jeff Gillooly.

Asked to name her favorite moment shooting the movie, she cited a scene with Stan that never made it to screen. It was part of a montage where things are getting so bad between Tonya and Jeff that the police show up. “[Director Craig Gillespie] kind of on the day was like, ‘Just do whatever in the moment,’” said Robbie, “and we got so carried away that I genuinely forgot that we were on a film set and that I wasn’t Tonya and that he wasn’t Jeff.” The ensuing fight was so intense, Gillespie had to cut it. “We got into, like a brawl,” said Robbie, clearly proud. “He slams my hand into the door. And I ended up storming off down the street, which was, like, the end of set, so I was just on the road in the real world.” She turned to Stan, “And you were coming after me, screaming, ‘Where are you going?’ I think you even said, ‘Margot,’ and I said, ‘I’m going to the hospital because you broke my hand!’ And I was so caught up in it and I think I punched you in the side of the head!”

Stan agreed that Robbie had indeed punched him in the head. Still, she went on, “That ended up being my favorite scene because I forgot that I was acting, and nothing makes me more exhilarated when I genuinely forget where I am.”

Something tells us that Sebastian Stan and the side of his head might feel a little bit differently about their favorite moment in the movie.

Source: Vulture.com

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Published by Carol

Published on Sep 10, 2017

Articles Blurbs I Tonya

Sep

2017 Toronto International Film Festival: ‘I, Tonya’ Review Round-Up

Check out various snippets below from a variety of reviews of I, Tonya after it’s debut at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.

Hollywood Repoter: Despite its title, the pic (written by Steven Rogers) is deliberate in spreading the narrative focus around. Based, per the opening title cards, on frank interviews with the participants that are re-created here, the film front-and-centers not just Robbie’s Tonya but her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan, endearingly stupid and embarrassed of his infamy), mother LaVona Golden (Allison Janney), skating coach Dian Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson) and deluded “bodyguard” Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser). All are sadder now; wisdom is less evenly distributed. But each brings something to the table — even the too-proper Rawlinson, who when training young Tonya always encouraged her to wear nicer clothes and clean up her manners: A movie this full of colorful wingnuts needs a voice from Squaresville. […]

Variety: Part of the film’s drama — almost its morality — is that Tonya, though a highly successful skater who starts to compete in national championships, gets lower scores than she deserves, and the judges, at several points, come out and admit that it’s about factors besides skating — what they call “presentation.” But that’s just code for conventionality, for wanting to sell a homogenized image of America on the Olympics level. It has nothing to do with what any of this is supposed to be about — skating — and that lends Tonya a streak of rebel realness.

That’s the good side of her contempt for respectability. The bad side is that she falls for Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), a loser in a sardine mustache who’s nice enough to Tonya — when he isn’t punching her in the face. Their relationship isn’t portrayed as one of those hellacious ones in which the abuser keeps the abused under his thumb by threatening her. Tonya, no matter how much she gets slapped around, simply won’t cut him loose; she marries him, and leaves him, and keeps coming back to him. The movie is sharp enough to suggest that she feels the echo of her mother’s hatred in every slap, and she can’t give that up. She’s addicted to what she thinks she deserves. […]

The Wrap: As a whole the film delights in and demands audience participation by breaking the fourth wall often. Robbie brings a brand of vinegar we haven’t seen in her previous work, and it illuminates a long-forgotten trainwreck.

A postscript on screen says that Tonya now builds and restores decks in Michigan. We’ll take their word that it‘s the f—— truth. […]

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Published by Carol

Published on Sep 09, 2017

Articles Press Projects

Mar

Samuel L. Jackson Joins Sebastian Stan in ‘The Last Full Measure’

It’s an Avengers reunion: Samuel L. Jackson has signed on to join Sebastian Stan in The Last Full Measure.

Christopher Plummer, William Hurt, Bradley Whitford, Michael Imperioli and Linus Roache also star in the film from Todd Robinson (White Squall, Lonely Hearts).

Based on the true story of a present-day cover-up investigation, The Last Full Measure follows young Pentagon investigator Scott Huffman (Stan) as he battles the political machine in Washington. He reluctantly teams with veterans of Operation Abilene to convince Congress to award the Medal of Honor to a courageous Air Force medic, William Pitsenbarger, who is seen saving the lives of more than 60 Marines who were ambushed in one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War. As the battle waged on, and after the last helicopter left, he continued to save lives until his own was sacrificed.

Foresight Unlimited is handling international sales and producing in association with Provocator and SSS Entertainment. Timothy Scott Bogart, Mark Damon, Lauren Selig, Julian Adams, Nicholas Cafritz, Robert Reed Peterson and Shaun Sanghani are producing, with Tamara Birkemoe, Jenna Sanz-Agero, Sidney Sherman, Louis Steyn and T.J. Steyn executive producing. Pen Densham and John Watson are co-executive producers.

Principal photography is set to begin later this month in Atlanta and Costa Rica.

“When I read Todd Robinson’s exceptionally moving script and heard the real-life interviews of the many men whom William Pitsenbarger saved, I felt this could be a great film. With the award-winning cast that has been assembled, I am now sure of it,” said Foresight Unlimited’s Mark Damon.

Stan is currently in production on Avengers: Infinity War for Marvel Studios/Disney and I, Tonya starring Margot Robbie, and has wrapped work on Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky. He is repped by ICM Partners and Brookside Artist Management.

Jackson will soon be seen in Legendary’s Kong: Skull Island, which Warner Bros. is releasing on Friday, and The Hitman’s Bodyguard for Lionsgate in August. He recently wrapped Brie Larson’s directorial debut Unicorn Store. Jackson is repped by ICM Partners and Anonymous Content.

Plummer can next be seen in The Exception for A24 and The Man Who Invented Christmas for Bleecker Street in December. Hurt can currently be seen on the Amazon series Goliath opposite Billy Bob Thornton and will next be seen in Live Like Line opposite Helen Hunt. Whitford is in postproduction on Unicorn Store and Three Christs starring Richard Gere; he previously starred in HBO’s All the Way and can currently be seen in the Universal hit Get Out. He’s repped by ICM Partners and Greenlight Management and Production. Imperioli most recently starred on Fox’s Lucifer, and Roache on History’s Vikings and in Netflix’s Barry.

Source: hollywoodreporter.com

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Published by Carol

Published on Mar 24, 2017

Articles Press Projects

Dec

Sebastian Stan Joins Margot Robbie in Tonya Harding Biopic

“Captain America: Civil War” actor Sebastian Stan has joined the cast of the Tonya Harding biopic “I, Tonya” starring Margot Robbie as the figure skater.

Miramax recently landed the rights to distribute the film. Craig Gillespie is directing. Robbie, who broke out in “Suicide Squad” this summer, will also produce along with Tom Ackerley through their Lucky Chap production company with Bryan Unkeless and Steven Rogers, who also wrote the screenplay.

Len Blavatnik and Aviv Giladi will executive produce for AI Film, which is financing the project. AI came on to the project in October.

Stan will play Jeff Gillooly, the estranged husband of Harding, who helped plot the attack on rival figure skater Nancy Kerrigan. Gillooly later revealed he and Harding’s bodyguard Shawn Eckhardt hired Shane Stant to break Kerrigan’s leg so she couldn’t compete in the upcoming 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer.

Besides reprising his role as the Winter Soldier in “Captain America: Civil War,” Stan also has the Steven Soderbergh heist movie “Logan Lucky” coming out next year.

Stan is repped by ICM Partners and Brookside Artist Management. Deadline Hollywood first reported the news.

Source: Variety.com

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Published by Carol

Published on Dec 13, 2016

Articles Captain America: Civil War Interviews

May

‘Captain America: Civil War’ Star Sebastian Stan Has ‘Birdman’ on His Mind

“I’m haunted by that movie Birdman,” Sebastian Stan tells me as we sit in a hotel room at the Los Angeles Four Seasons while the press day for Captain America: Civil War unfolds around us. Based on the number of men and women with headsets stationed near doors, you’d think there was a head of state in town — and really, how far off is that comparison? The Avengers actors aren’t running any nations, but they do represent Disney’s flagship franchise, one so elaborate they had to invent a term for it: a cinematic universe. By the time Civil War leaves theaters, this universe will have made Disney $10 billion worldwide; knowing that, the pomp and circumstance doesn’t seem so overblown.

Stan, who plays Bucky Barnes, a.k.a. the Winter Soldier — namesake of the second Captain America movie and an even bigger part of this new one — is clearly trying to wrap his head around this superhero life. Thus, the reference to Birdman: a movie about an actor attempting to erase the memories of his superhero alter ego by staging a serious play; a movie in which an actor’s superhero alter ego follows him like a ghost, reminding him it’s the hero people want to see, not the washed-up actor and his play; a movie that exists as a rebuke to the tights-clad tentpoles that have taken over the industry. This seems like a matter for a licensed therapist, not one of the revolving door of journalists coming through press day. Is Stan worried that his alter ego, the Winter Soldier, will overtake Sebastian Stan, the actor?

“I think that depends on what choices you make as an actor in your time off,” he explains. “But it’s an interesting — I love how in Birdman, it talks so much about where the persona ends and when the person and the character become the same thing. Because I’ve seen that happen with certain people. Certain characters become so popular, right, because people just love to see them.”

It’s a valid consideration for a guy like Stan, who has chops and experience and was certainly not raised with the expectation of becoming a movie star. Born in Romania, Stan made his way to the United States by the age of 12 and studied at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts, including a year at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London. After school, he did work on the stage, including a run with Liev Schreiber in Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio — here’s Stan doing a Bogosian monologue — as well as on film and TV, highlighted by a recurring role on Gossip Girl and parts in Black Swan and Rachel Getting Married. Continue reading

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Published by Carol

Published on May 09, 2016

Articles Captain America: Civil War Interviews Press

May

Sebastian Talks Stunts and Training for ‘Civil War’ with Philly.com

As Captain America’s best friend Bucky – and as the subsequently brainwashed-by-the-Soviets-to-be-an-assassin-Winter Soldier – Sebastian Stan has been a key character in what is now an iconic trilogy.

With the third installment, Civil War, he is a primary cause of the, uh, civil war, led on opposite sides by Iron Man and the red, white and blue Avenger.

“The appeal is simple,” Stan said at a recent Marvel press event. “It’s a challenge.

“Every scene the Russos [Joe and Anthony, the film’s directors] and I would get together and go, ‘Where is he now? Does he remember this? Does he not? Did he remember that he might have committed that crime or not? So there’s a lot of fun questions with how to play it.

“We saw in the first movie – that’s the [real] guy. Then, this is what happened to him in the second movie and this movie is, ‘How does he live with it now?'”

Stan’s Bucky is in fights with at least 10 characters during the course of the film and he says it was a challenge with the Russos to make each fight distinctive.

“It’s like a dance,” Stan said. Plus, “we just had an amazing stunt team. These guys come from places like Ip Man and The Raid and all those awesome Asian films. So, it’s just a lot of repetition over and over.

“It’s like ballet.”

Stan said there was additional excitement in the stunt work because he wasn’t wearing a mask.

“I was like ‘the audience is going to see it’s me,’ so I was determined to do as much of [the action scenes] as I could, to the point where I was a pain in the ass to them – but I didn’t care, because I can sit here and tell you that I’ve done 90 percent of those fight scenes. I was even on the motorcycle.” Continue reading

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Published by Carol

Published on May 05, 2016

Articles Captain America: Civil War Interviews Press

May

Los Angeles Times: With ‘Captain America: Civil War,’ Sebastian Stan crosses over from parts unknown

a child, Sebastian Stan occupied more countries than most people do houses. At the age of 8, he moved from his native Romania to Vienna, and then, four years later, to New York.

Now 33, Stan doesn’t think all that dislocation was always healthy. But it may have given him a certain psychological edge in understanding characters who slip from one guise to another.

“It was hard. You’re inhabiting different worlds, speaking different languages,” Stan said in an interview recently. “But it helped me in a way. When you’re young you just want to fit in. And when you’re older you realize that what it really did was make you OK with feeling different.”

Stan is decidedly a man caught between two worlds in Anthony and Joe Russo’s “Captain America: Civil War.” The new and well-reviewed superhero movie, which begins its U.S. run Thursday night after a massive opening overseas, has Stan revisiting his role as James “Bucky” Barnes, a.k.a “The Winter Solider.” As viewers of the erstwhile film named for him know (and the first “Captain America” before that), Barnes was a respected U.S. military man — and childhood friend of Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) — later brainwashed into working for the Soviets as a kind of human instrument of torture, before (possibly) remembering his roots and seeking redemption.

As viewers of the new film soon learn, Barnes will continue to evolve, as will the significance of his role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The character in “Civil War” becomes, owing to past actions, a key fillip in the tension between emerging rivals Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Rogers’ Captain America. He is, in a real sense, the pivot point around which all the action revolves.

As Stan eats a burger at a restaurant near his downtown Manhattan apartment on a recent Friday afternoon, he shows little of the prepossession of a man whose actions are about to viewed and scrutinized by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

His long hair hangs straight to his chin, a ballcap sits in his hand and his face wears the kind of stubble that is neither shadow nor beard. A pair of designer-casual shoes are the only hint of someone with a more upscale day job.

Stan recently moved to the neighborhood, and he’s taking a breather from the kind of media siege that wasn’t exactly standard for past roles on the likes of “Gossip Girl,” “Once Upon a Time” and several New York theater projects. In a few days he will appear on a morning show (“GMA”) for the first time and is about to embark on the type of circuit of late-night hosts (Stephen Colbert, James Corden) usually reserved for Super Bowl MVPs

It is a far cry from the actor who, on graduating from a theater program at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, just wanted to stay busy. Continue reading

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Published by Carol

Published on May 05, 2016

Articles Captain America: Civil War Interviews Photos

May

Backstage: Don’t Underestimate ‘Captain America’ Star Sebastian Stan

Let’s say you’re playing an American soldier with severe post-traumatic stress disorder struggling to assimilate back into society. For the last several decades you’ve also been forcibly brainwashed to forget compassion and embrace violence to the point of desensitization, but memories of your old life as a decent man begin to emerge. Sounds like a juicy role for an actor, right?

These are the challenges facing Sebastian Stan in “Captain America: Civil War,” the newest comic-to-big-screen installment from Marvel Studios. Don’t be fooled by the whiz-bang action sequences and glossy production values of such blockbusters; actors playing superheroes must flex their acting muscles as much as those in prestige dramas—not to mention their literal muscles, too.

“When I go to work I don’t discriminate it as a comic-book movie,” says Stan over coffee at Manhattan’s the Gander. “It’s full-on commitment. That’s all you can do.” Stan and his Marvel Cinematic Universe co-stars, who include such awards season heavyweights as Mark Ruffalo, Tilda Swinton, and Michael Douglas, are using sheer talent to elevate the ostensibly lowbrow genre.

“Comic-book movies are mythology in a way, and there are a lot more parallels in them with what’s going on in the real world than people want to discuss,” Stan points out. His “Captain America” character, the Winter Soldier (né Bucky Barnes), for instance, is a scarred serviceman without a place to call home; Stan need only look at the state of veterans’ affairs today to take the role seriously. “A lot of these people come back and they don’t know how to function in the world anymore; the world is not embracing them in the same way. That was a big part of this character’s journey in this film: Understanding the world that he’s finally found himself in. How is he going to function there?”

This level of actorly preparation isn’t usually associated with sci-fi flicks raking in billions of dollars. “People have their own stigmas about it,” says Stan frankly. “I know when people are considering me for jobs sometimes it’s, ‘Well, you’re in a comic-book movie.’ And I’m, like, ‘But I’m killing myself to try to do the best I can!’ ”

“Sebastian embodies the notion of a hardworking actor,” says Joe Russo, who co-directed both “Civil War” and the franchise’s second installment, “The Winter Soldier.” “His level of commitment is fantastic. He really finds the greatest level of detail in his performance.” In establishing a middle ground between Bucky and the Winter Soldier, he says, Stan conveys volumes while saying very little. “It’s the hardest thing to do as an actor, to convey emotion and subtlety without speaking.”

Anthony Russo agrees. “He has to come up with such a complex inner life. I think when you see him perform the character you see that, you see the complexity in his eyes and his physicality. He tells an amazing story through all those tools.” It helps that on the big screen, he adds, Stan is easy on the eyes. “It’s that phrase: The camera really loves him.”

According to Stan, listening is one of his biggest challenges in front of the lens. He marvels at Marlene Dietrich’s ability to remain still and allow audiences to project emotion onto her. “The trick is to shut off your brain,” he says. “ ‘Be interesting! Do something interesting! You’re staying too long in the same angle!’ It has to be about courage and you have to deal with that part of your brain that likes to edit and censor you. Maybe some don’t have that. I, however, do.” Continue reading

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Published by Carol

Published on May 04, 2016