Sebastian Stan Fan

Deadline

EXCLUSIVE: Sebastian Stan is that rare breed of actor who uses his star superpower to help get movies such as Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner Fjord made – a film that explores topics of religious intolerance and violence towards children.

As a thespian, he will do whatever’s necessary for the character. For Fjord, he’s almost unrecognizable with his hair shaved down to his scalp and unflattering costumes that could’ve been made outta potato sacks.

Soon, he says, he’ll be in London (over summer) for Matt Reeves’ The Batman: Part II, where he’ll play “many roles in this one”

He’s referring to the character Harvey Dent, who starts off as Gotham’s crime-fighting District Attorney who descends into madness when underworld figure Sal “Boss” Maroni hurls acid in his face scarring the left side, hence the Two-Face moniker he takes up.

Having mastered the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this marks his first foray into WB’s Batman DC world.

”I’m excited, I’m nervous and trying to keep surprising myself,” he says of taking on Two-Face and working with the hair and makeup teams who have devised how his disfigurement will look.

We’ve met a few times, notably, here and at Telluride when he was travelling with The Apprentice film where he portrayed a young Donald Trump, a portrayal that garnered him a much deserved Best Actor Oscar nomination.

I can well imagine that Neon, which has Fjord in the U.S., will have the actor, and Renate Reinsve, who plays his wife in the film that’s set in small-town Norway [some might say small-minded Norway, parts of it anyway], on the next awards season cycle. In reality, the next awards season began Saturday night when the prizes were being handed out in the Grand Theatre Auditorium Louis Lumière.

Stan plays a Romanian family man who travels with his five children to live in his wife’s Norwegian hometown.

Their strong Christian beliefs become an issue with some locals and they’re accused of violence towards their children who are removed and placed with foster parents.

Having knowledge of fostering and violence towards children [my wife was once a communications director with the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children], the movie struck a chord; I was totally captivated by it.

Stan says he thought it was “very brave of the jury to recognize the film in terms of just the questions it raises — this divisiveness, this inability to agree on anything and to me the film really speaks towards doubt, but not necessarily in a negative way, in a positive way that perhaps we should invite more doubt into our lives, not necessarily doubt in other people but doubting ourselves a bit and our own mindsets and our own belief systems — we could be wrong about other people. We just need to get away from extremism because it doesn’t work.“

When he came to live in the U.S. with his mother, having been raised in Romania, he was the age of the two older children in Fjord. “I was twelve and I have the most empathy for the children in the movie. All they want is to fit in and to be accepted. But when you’re an immigrant and you’re a kid, and you’ve got society telling you one thing and your parents are telling you another thing, where’s room for you [the kid] left in any of that?”

Hopefully, after he completes The Batman: Part II, he’ll take on another powerful, socially aware picture.