I’ve added high quality scans from Entertainment Weekly as well as their gorgeous new photoshoot with Sebastian! Thanks to my friend Claudia for the scans!
Category: Press
NAME Sebastian Stan
AGE 31
ORIGIN Born in Romania, moved to Rockland County, N.Y., at age 12.
KNOWN WHEREABOUTS In addition to Captain America: The First Avenger, Stan has appeared on ABC’s Once Upon a Time and in the film Black Swan. Last winter he starred on Broadway in Picnic.
ALIAS The Winter Soldier, a bioengineered assassin with a robotic arm, rumored to be the perpetrator of some of the 20th century’s most notorious political killings. In his previous life he was Bucky Barnes, an American -soldier who served alongside Steve Rogers/Captain America, but went missing in action and was presumed dead.
WEAPON OF CHOICE That fearsome mechanical arm his character sports in Captain America: The Winter Soldier is often digitally enhanced. On set, Stan wore a chrome-painted rubber sheath marked with motion-capture dots. After several weeks of filming, it looked like the battered aluminum ventilation hose on a clothes dryer. “It’s gotten more flexible over time,” Stan told EW during filming. “It’s a lot like breaking in a shoe. Sometimes, by the end of the day, I forget I have it on.”
MOTIVATION Real-life heroes, actually. “There is a bionic arm that certain amputees can use if their nerve endings are still there,” Stan says. “Most guys have the option of choosing an arm that looks like a human arm, and they all pick the robotic arm. It’s like ‘I am who I am.’ That grounded the character for me.”
Source: EW.com
Check out Sebastian’s interview in full over at TheWrap.com!
Marvel Studios is known for its secrecy — both among fans, and the stars of the movies themselves.
Take Sebastian Stan, for instance. He landed the crucial role of Bucky Barnes, the best friend of Steve Rogers, in 2011’s first “Captain America” film. The movie ended with Bucky presumed dead, but with the actor signed to a nine-picture deal and the comics providing plenty of roadmaps for the character’s future, it was pretty obvious to everyone that his fall in “The First Avenger” would not be the last we heard from Stan or his character.
Common wisdom aside, however, no one knew exactly how Barnes would return — include Stan himself.
“I knew about the storyline of the character, and kind of what happens in the comic books; they educated me on the character when we started discussing him, but everything was sort of ‘Knock on wood, if things go well, we’ll see how it goes,’” Stan told TheWrap, referring to the uncertainty surrounding the future of his big screen alter-ego.
As it turns out, the actor found out that Barnes would come back as the villainous Winter Soldier — an amnesiac Soviet assassin — “about two years after we shot the first film,” he said.
So Stan did some recon work himself, working off clues he found both in the comics and in the initial script for the first film. He also did his best not to worry about how the other Marvel films would or could impact his own — even if it boasted crossover stars like Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury) and Cobie Smulders (Maria Hill).
He was just excited to be working with them, he said, and got himself ready to go when the call came.
“When you have a lineage of books to turn to, you can kind of find cool character stuff that you hope to kind of bring into the movie if there’s an opportunity,” Stan said.
“Some things just don’t translate very well from the page to the screen, and sometimes they need to be kind of revised a little bit, just to make more sense, so that’s why, at least in this case, Bucky Barnes from the beginning of the movies was never that teenage sidekick that you saw in the comic books … They really wanted it to have a different dynamic and friendship and that was from the start in the screenplays.”
Also helpful: Talking with the person that created the character of The Winter Soldier in the first place.
Apr
03
Check out Sebastian’s interview in its entirety over at MovieFone.com
Moviefone: Did you see the Winter Soldier as a “tragic” figure?
Sebastian Stan: Yeah, I did, but you can’t play that, you know. It’s not something that you can really use. Me as an outsider looking at a character like that I would say tragic, yes. Me as the actor kind of playing him, I saw him as a real viable threatening weapon. Somebody who just is almost operating from complete mechanical automatic ways of existing in life. He has very little trace of humanity left to him. And then somebody that essentially is starting to kind of feel things that he’s not — he hasn’t felt in a while. He doesn’t know why.How do you find your way into his head?
I don’t know. I don’t really know. I think there was a lot of research that I did in the months before we started shooting, where I was able to kind of observe certain — I watched a lot of documentaries on post-traumatic stress and a lot of army documentaries about the training programs and some of the extreme sort of circumstances that some of those guys that are training to be Navy SEALs and some who are a part of it go through.I was trying to understand what it is, what it means for someone to be desensitized, to no longer question hurting something. I did as much research on all that stuff as I could in order to kind of know what that was like. And then my stepdad actually has Alzheimer’s, so there were parts about watching and studying that kind of disease, also, observing people like that that kind of helped me a little bit.
Sorry to hear about your stepdad.
Oh, thank you.A lot of actors say it’s fun to play villains because you can go big. But this guy has a lot of stillness in him. Was it still fun?
Yeah, it’s really hard. It is hard because there’s always going to be that voice in your head that’s going, “Are you sure they’re going to get it? You sure you don’t want to do a little bit more? Maybe you should use more facial expression or be more angry and do more, do more.” You have to kind of keep that voice in check. The more stillness the character had, and the more sort of nonchalant attitude about what he was doing, you know, the better it was going to come across. Everything to him should have felt like a typical day, a walk in the park.
Vulture.com — Sebastian Stan didn’t know much about Marvel comics when he first auditioned for the title role in Captain America, so when he landed the part of Cap’s best bud Bucky Barnes instead, it might have seemed like just another supporting role — especially when Bucky bit the big one in the first film. But now that Stan’s all caught up on his reading material, as he assured Vulture at Monday night’s Cinema Society screening for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the actor is super excited about what may come in future installments (notwithstanding his juicy role as the transformed Winter Soldier in this one). “It’s only in recent years that I’ve become a fan,” he admitted. “And now I’m really into the story line and I’ve read all the [Ed] Brubaker stuff, so now I’m really going in and going, ‘Okay, this is cool. Wow, I’m lucky this is the character I ended up with.'”
Brubaker’s “Winter Soldier” arc was a comic-book game-changer for Captain America, not only because he resurrected the thought-to-be-dead Bucky Barnes, but because his story line changed Cap’s image, questioned his loyalty, and turned the sidekick into the lead character. “Honestly, at this point, it’s amazing,” Stan said. “I waited for two years to hear whether I was coming back for the sequel, so it’s a great thing to have this thing with Marvel, where they call you up, you suit up, and you go to work.”
Going to work on future installments could mean some juicy fight scenes with Tony Stark (since the mind-controlled Winter Soldier assassinated his dad). “I wouldn’t mind that at all,” Stan said. “Iron Man would definitely outwit the Winter Soldier very quickly, in terms of banter, but after that? Maybe things would turn out a different way.”
As for any potential love scenes with the Black Widow herself — an arc that played out in the comics — Stan wouldn’t mind those, either. “Hey, listen, I could talk about the Black Widow all you want!” he laughed. “That’s an amazing story line. I would love for that to happen.” The actor got a little tongue-tied, even, musing on the possibility of seducing Scarlett Johansson onscreen: “That is … something … one should … have a chance at doing. Yes.”