Category: Blurbs

Oct

News: Sebastian Stan Scolds “Hypocrite” Trump at ‘The Apprentice’ U.K. Premiere: “Do You Really Trust This Person to Lead a Country?”

The Hollywood Reporter – Stan, who portrays Donald Trump in Ali Abbasi’s new movie, was asked whether this film debuting so close to the U.S. election could sway voters: “He’s been trying to censor this movie, and at the same time, he claims he acknowledges free speech. I can’t think of anything more hypocritical.”

Sebastian Stan has branded former U.S. president Donald Trump a hypocrite who has attempted to “censor” his new movie, The Apprentice.

The Marvel actor spoke at the BFI London Film Festival premiere of Ali Abbasi’s movie about Trump’s rise to power in 1970s and ’80s New York — in which he stars as the real estate mogul-turned-Republican politician — with the teachings of mentor Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong) guiding him on his ascension.

When asked whether this film debuting so close to the U.S. election could sway voters, Stan told The Hollywood Reporter: “I don’t know, but what I do hope is that people, regardless of their opinion, are curious enough to try to dig deeper. Because I think we’re living in a world where it’s so easy to be handed an opinion everywhere you turn. And I know a lot of people love social media, and that’s where they go for information and for things. You’re being told what to think. You’re being told what to do.”

But, the Marvel star continued, “If you have any inkling of interest, go and really ask yourself: ‘Who is this man? Do you really know? Do you really trust this person to lead a country?’ He’s been trying to censor this movie, and at the same time, he claims that he acknowledges free speech … I can’t think of anything more hypocritical. So at the end of the day, it’s about him as a character. Forget the politics and just go in there and use your instinct and ask yourself: Do you trust this man? That’s what the movie is about.”

The feature film opened in roughly 1,700 theaters across the U.S. last weekend after its debut in Cannes and pulled in an anemic $1.6 million in its first weekend. Trump lashed out against the film after the numbers came in.

“A FAKE and CLASSLESS Movie written about me, called, The Apprentice (Do they even have the right to use that name without approval?), will hopefully “bomb.” It’s a cheap, defamatory and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Sherman told THR: “It’s not surprising [that Trump lashed out]… You’ve seen the film, the first lesson that Roy Cohn teaches him is: attack, attack, attack. So Trump hasn’t seen the movie, but he’s clearly following the rules that are in the movie.”

Sherman also said part of the inspiration for this film was to show Trump as carrying on Cohn’s legacy, as sources who worked on the 2016 Trump campaign told him the businessman was just “using Roy’s lessons.”

The Apprentice received rave reviews and an 8-minute standing ovation after its Cannes Film Festival premiere in May.

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Published by Samantha

Published on Oct 15, 2024

Articles Blurbs Press The Apprentice

Sep

News: Playing Donald Trump In The Apprentice ‘Was Like Riding A Psychotic Horse Through A Blazing Stable’

Empire Magazine

How do you even begin to play a character like Donald Trump? One of the most polarising figures of the 21st century has, at various points, been a general celebrity-adjacent public persona; a reality TV host; then, one of America’s most divisive politicians. For Sebastian Stan – whose on-screen political subterfuge has so far been of the fictional kind as the MCU’s Winter Soldier – that was one of the biggest challenges of The Apprentice. No, not the business-flavoured series that Trump hosted in the US, but the title of Ali Abbasi’s new film, dramatising Trump’s early years.

As Stan tells Empire, the process of parsing everything that swirls around Donald Trump – the anger, the adoration, the hate-him-or-love-him obsession – while synthesising what needed to come across in The Apprentice was one hell of a challenge. “Working on it with Ali was like riding a psychotic horse through a blazing stable,” the actor says. It was a role that not only required getting inside Trump, but also assessing everything outside of him too. “We’re talking about somebody that everyone has an opinion about, that everyone has an impression of, that everyone has strong feelings for. I had to distance myself from that, but also I was paying attention to how he has been portrayed,” Stan explains. “So I watched everything. I watched stuff that impersonators did. All the things. But I also just had to go towards the collaboration and the vision that I was sharing with Ali.”

The result is a film that explores the moulding of the Trump we know under the wing of New York attorney Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong), dialling into the man behind the maelstrom. “The film normalises him. To some degree,” notes Stan. “There’s a preference to speak about him in a very selective, sort of distanced way. Like he’s this separate entity from the rest of us humans here on Earth. He’s either God, in the skies, blessed by everything, or he’s like Satan incarnate into the depths of the Earth. And the truth is, he is a human being. The movie shows there is much more here to relate and understand than I think we’re willing to admit. And to me, there’s a journey of watching a man turn to stone over a process of time.”

Read Empire’s full The Apprentice story – speaking to Sebastian Stan and Ali Abbasi about their provocative Donald Trump origin story – in the 40 Years Of The Terminator issue, on sale Thursday 26 September. The Apprentice comes to UK cinemas from 18 October.

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Published by Samantha

Published on Sep 24, 2024

A Different Man Blurbs Press

Jan

News: What’s going to pop big at Sundance? We have thoughts (‘A Different Man’)

LA Times

[…]

A24 has another movie that should have people talking this year: “A Different Man,” starring Sebastian Stan as an actor with neurofibromatosis who undergoes an operation to radically transform his features. When he wakes up, he looks like … Sebastian Stan. This improves his dating life, but he can’t score any jobs, because his looks are now too generic. Meanwhile, the woman who loved him pre-surgery (played by Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve, so great in “The Worst Person in the World”), dumps him and writes a play based on their relationship. Think “Being John Malkovich” starring the guy known for playing Bucky Barnes, and you’ll understand why this will break social media platforms when it premieres.

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Published by Samantha

Published on Jan 15, 2024

Articles Blurbs Press

Nov

News: ‘The O.C.’ Oral History Book Revelations: Sebastian Stan’s Audition (and Other Casting Surprises), an Edited Kiss and That George Lucas Cameo

Hollywood Reporter – ‘The O.C.’ Oral History Book Revelations: Sebastian Stan’s Audition (and Other Casting Surprises), an Edited Kiss and That George Lucas Cameo

[…]

Sebastian Stan Was the Casting That Got Away

The oral history is full of casting tidbits, including an extensive rundown of how the core four were selected alongside guest and recurring characters like Chris Pratt and Olivia Wilde, the actors who didn’t get roles (including Chris Pine, who lost out over his acne) and even the show’s decision to recast certain characters. That includes Marissa’s (Barton) little sister Kaitlin — who went from Shailene Woodley to Willa Holland — and Ryan’s (McKenzie) brother Trey, who was originally portrayed by Bradley Stryker before Logan Marshall-Green was hired to play out a more extensive storyline.

But in one of the most interesting tidbits, the showrunners and casting head Patrick Rush reveal that actor Sebastian Stan — who would go on to appear in Schwartz and Savage’s sophomore hit Gossip Girl before becoming a screen staple of the MCU — was actually up for one of the show’s most controversial characters: Johnny — the public school version of Ryan in season three that Marissa meets after being kicked out of Harbor School. Sepinwall reveals that, in a group chat, Schwartz and Savage admitted to having zero memory of Stan’s audition, with Savage texting, “wtf is wrong with us?” after jogging their memory. “I had seen Sebastian Stan audition from New York for some role, and they weren’t testing him. And I sent it to Josh and Stephanie, like, ‘This kid’s really good.’ And they flew him out to test, and still didn’t hire him,” Rush recalls.
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Schwartz told Sepinwall, “I said to Patrick Rush, ‘This is the worst thing to come out of this book. I hate us.’ He goes, ‘You can just tell him not to put it in the book.’ And I said, ‘No, the shame must be publicly shared. We cannot hold this inside.’”

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Published by Samantha

Published on Nov 29, 2023

Blurbs Pam & Tommy Press

Aug

News: Danny Strong, Shonda Rhimes and Other Limited Series Showrunners on Their Emmy-Nominated Series

Hollywood Reporter – The creatives behind “Dopesick,” “The Dropout,” “Inventing Anna,” “Pam & Tommy” and “The White Lotus” take THR behind the scenes of their shows.

Rob Siegel and D.V. DeVincentis, showrunners of Pam & Tommy (Hulu)

DeVincentis: “We did exhaustive research, and Lily [James] would still find things that we didn’t know about that turned out to be crucial to the storytelling. Lily and Sebastian [Stan] were the best custodians of characters I’ve ever seen. Their dedication and their love of the characters is so overwhelming, and it’s all there. And by the way, Sebastian, because his transformation isn’t as extreme, the specificity that he’s using isn’t quite as noticeable, but it’s every bit as potent. Particularly recently, I’ve seen some footage of Tommy Lee talking, and after seeing hours of it after watching Sebastian do it, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, Sebastian was really inhabiting it.’ It was incredible.”

Siegel: “For me, the archival interviews, hearing them talk. You can just learn so much from video footage.”
DeVincentis: “If you watch enough interviews with Pam, particularly the late night interviews, you start to see how brilliantly and with the sort of innate intelligence she handles the situation. You watch what she’s putting up with, and you see her putting up with it. I like to think there’s sort of a larger goal, like she knows people are going to be sexist and gross and shitty to her, but if she gets through it, she gets to talk about things that are really important to her, like animal rights and PETA. And to me, the behavior in watching how she handles really insensitive, crappy people was the most instructive thing about that character to me in terms of research.”

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Published by Samantha

Published on Aug 16, 2022

Articles Blurbs Pam & Tommy Press

Jun

Press: Behind the Whirlwind Romance of ‘Pam & Tommy,’ There’s a Longstanding Creative Partnership

Indie Wire – Behind the Whirlwind Romance of ‘Pam & Tommy,’ There’s a Longstanding Creative Partnership

Australian director Craig Gillespie creates an energy in his images that brings the emotional undercurrent of his characters to life. He invites you into their space to wash in their feelings without saying too much. It’s the result of close collaboration with key department heads, a dynamic that editor Tatiana Riegel was first introduced to on 2007’s “Lars and the Real Girl.” “Craig is remarkably collaborative and secure in his own feelings and ideas to not insist upon them but he allows people to interpret them where he can then say yes or no,” she told IndieWire.

Riegel said their efforts have blossomed over the course of projects like “I, Tonya” (for which she earned an Oscar nomination), “Cruella,” “The United States of Tara” in part, because even though they “are very different people, the yin and yang of it works pretty well.” Gillespie has grown fond of how effortlessly the editor navigates outside the box. “We did our first assembly of ‘Lars’ and there was an interview scene between Ryan [Gosling] and Patricia Clarkson [who plays a therapist] that I thought was too long,” he said. “Tatiana said, ‘Maybe it’s in the wrong place.’ So we pulled out the scene cards and rearranged the whole second half of the film and that scene never got shorter. Since then, we’ve never settled on the structure of the script and we’ll always think about moving something around or tightening.

The simpatico relationship gives Riegel the “courage to try things” she might otherwise be conservative about with someone new, a trust that continued into the first trio of episodes of “Pam & Tommy,” Hulu’s limited series about how the infamous Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape found its way onto the web.

Creator Robert Siegel based “Pam & Tommy” on a 2014 Rolling Stone article that details how the “Baywatch” star and Mötley Crüe drummer first met, and the “karma” that led to their private life being exposed. After stripping away the public persona and glamor of these two famous icons – portrayed convincingly well by Lily James and Sebastian Stan — “Pam & Tommy” depicts a couple unequivocally supporting each other while falling deeper in love — until it collapses.

“The tone was incredibly clear to me and that’s something I always look for when searching for something to work on,” Gillespie said. “If I can visualize it while I’m reading [the script], half the job is done.”
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Published by Samantha

Published on Jun 27, 2022

Articles Blurbs Pam & Tommy Press

Jun

Press: ‘Pam & Tommy,’ ‘Only Murders in the Building’ and ‘Russian Doll’ Editors Explain How They Cut Together Their Most Challenging Scenes

Hollywood Reporter – These series blend comedy and drama, which meant their editors had to find the right tonal balance.

Tatiana Riegel’s long collaboration with director Craig Gillespie includes I, Tonya — the dark comedy about the Tonya Harding 1990s figure skating scandal for which the editor earned an Oscar nomination — and their latest, Pam & Tommy, for which she again had to walk a fine line between humor and seriousness.

“For Craig to be attached to it, I knew there was going to be a certain emotional level to it,” she says of the Hulu limited series, which revolves around the marriage of model-actress Pamela Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee and their notorious sex tape. “And it would be intriguing in addition to his comic sense, [showcasing] his ability to sort of walk back and forth between those two places in a lovely way.”

Riegel, whose work with Gillespie also spans Lars and the Real Girl (2007) and Disney’s Cruella (2021), cut the first three episodes of Pam & Tommy, which vary greatly. The first follows Seth Rogen as Rand Gauthier, the man who steals valuables (and, inadvertently, the sex tape) from the couple after Lee (Sebastian Stan) stiffs him on a construction job. The second goes back in time, showing viewers how Pam (Lily James) and Tommy met, fell in love and were married. The third in the eight-episode arc picks up the narrative just after Rand had stolen the tape, and the story proceeds from there.

“Then you get into this much more emotional storyline of what’s happening to Pam — both of them — but I feel, or at least how I interpreted it, was sort of more the Pam story,” Riegel says. “A lot of it is defined by the script, and that’s the jumping-off point in terms of the broader themes of fame, how women are treated versus men and a love story that is very unusual. Those are the things that I really liked about the scripts for the first three episodes that I read, early on, and that I thought were just going to be really fun and challenging to cut.”

Finding each character’s tone was critical. She says of the first episode, “Seth Rogen is obviously known for this wonderful, great, broad, hysterical comedy, and this was a very different role for him. It was much quieter and stiller. [In the editing, I had to] find that and make sure that we didn’t drift into other things.”

She also had to navigate the arc of Stan’s Lee as he is seen in the first episode by Rand. “To make Tommy Lee as unappealing as he actually is in that first episode [took] work, because Sebastian’s fantastic and charming,” says Riegel, who also worked with Stan on I, Tonya (he played Harding’s then-husband, Jeff Gillooly). “You have to find all of those moments without making him too horrible because you want the audience to empathize with him and be into his story as well. But he’s doing dreadful things in the first episode and is really a jerk. Finding that line is just always interesting.”

In contrast, a very different side of Lee is seen in episode two, during which newlyweds Pam and Tommy are home one night watching TV and Pam introduces her husband to The King and I. She sings “Getting to Know You” from the classic musical as the pair playfully giggle and dance around the bedroom.

“That particular scene was a real pivotal turning point, emotionally, in the story,” Riegel says. “This is a really unusual scene, to have a character like Tommy Lee watching this musical. She’s so into it. I find it to be this really sweet, vulnerable scene that they both are participating in. And I feel like that really cracks the door open for the rest of the season.”

It was also a tough scene to cut, she adds. “They’re moving all over this room, and musically, you’re having to follow along with the specific song and create the fun, the movement, the emotion, the relationship, the vulnerability, all of those things happening all at once.”

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Published by Samantha

Published on Jun 18, 2022

Articles Blurbs Press The Falcon and The Winter Soldier

Jun

News/Rumor: ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ Might Resume Production in July

ComicBookMovie.com — At this point, it’s fair to say that Disney+ is in desperate need of fresh content, and if The Falcon and The Winter Soldier doesn’t premiere in August as planned, there will be a lot of unhappy subscribers. There’s not a whole lot Marvel Studios can do about that, though, as COVID-19 continues to cause production delays across the globe.

However, following the news that Paul Bettany has been forced to cancel a Comic-Con appearance next month so he can get back to work on WandaVision for reshoots, it’s now said that both The Falcon and The Winter Soldier and Loki will also likely continue production in July.

Liz Hill has shared a lot of reliable intel in recent months, so she definitely counts as a trustworthy source.

It’s unclear how the complications surrounding movie and TV shoots will affect these plans as studios are forced to adhere to strict new safety measures, but if these final scenes can be filmed in a studio, that will make things a lot easier. For now, we’ll obviously just have to wait and see.

We were all excited by recent news Paul Bettany had to cancel a July comiccon due to WandaVision filming. I've just learned that #Loki and #FalconAndtheWinterSoldier are also expected to continue filming in July. This is a new source for me & I must keep it anon but I believe it! pic.twitter.com/nayj453ZaI

— Liz (@MsLizzieHill) June 5, 2020

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Published by Carol

Published on Jun 07, 2020

Articles Blurbs Media Press Videos

Dec

Press/Video: The Wild, Wonderful Absurdity of Sebastian Stan’s ‘Cheat Day’

MensHealth.com – Find someone who looks at you the same way Sebastian Stan looks at a box of donuts.

Sebastian Stan is just like you and me, aside from the fact that he’s a chiseled, obscenely handsome action star who played one of the most beloved characters in one of the most successful movie franchises of all time and will play that same beloved character in one of the most ambitious upcoming original series on the most successful new streaming service. But other than that, he’s just like you and me.

And after a long day of work (in this case, a topless photoshoot), Stan likes to unwind like the rest of us normies: with a hearty helping of junk food. In this short film titled Cheat Day, which was conceived by the Men’s Health January/February cover star himself, Stan paces New York City blocks seeking pizza, donuts, dumplings and more. He finishes his quest with a Frankenstein’s monster of sugar, carbs, and who-knows-what combined to produce the most over-the-top cheat day meal you’ve ever seen in your life. Stan also displays his encyclopedic knowledge of the Big Apple’s geography (he grew up an hour north in Rockland County, NY, and once starred on Broadway in William Inge’s Picnic), confirming “there is no 4th and Lex.”

If you only know Stan from the MCU, you might not fully grasp his penchant for absurd humor. But if you truly stan Stan, then you’re familiar with @OneMinuteMen, which features experimental short films starring Stan and his friend Will Malnati. Much like the donut-filled, pizza and potato chips taco monstrosity feasted upon in Cheat Day, Sebastian Stan has layers.

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Published by Samantha

Published on Dec 19, 2019