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.
Category: Batman: Part 2
Deadline (This interview includes video at the link)
Note: For Screencaps of this interview click here.
During a break from shooting The Batman: Part II in the U.K, Sebastian Stan sat down with Deadline at Cannes to chat about his latest film Fjord, which premiered at the festival last week in Competition and received an extraordinary 12-minute standing ovation.
Speaking alongside co-star Renate Reinsve and 2007 Palme d’Or-winning writer-director Cristian Mungiu, Stan mused on his decision to take on risky roles — in 2024 he played Trump in The Apprentice, and now, in Fjord he is a deeply religious man who admits to occasionally slapping his children.
“I just love that the movie wasn’t necessarily telling you exactly what to think or how to feel, but really just presenting you the situation and making you think,” he said. “I think for people that go see the movie at the end when they walk out of it, they’re going to have a moment with themselves where they’re actually reflecting about what came up for them when they were watching the movie and that’s what’s really more important.”
In the film, based on the experiences of a real-life Romanian family, Stan and Reinsve play Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu — immigrant parents of five children who move from Romania to Lisbet’s small Norwegian hometown. When a neighboring family spots bruises on the couple’s daughter, the Gheorghui family are torn apart by a child services investigation.
Mungiu said he was very grateful to Stan for choosing the role — his first in his native Romanian language — in a film that’s far removed from the sort of mainstream experience Stan might typically be expected to choose. “They were very generous with me, especially Sebastian,” Mungiu said. “He comes from mainstream cinema, where taking risks is not precisely the regular sport — you’d just prefer to be on the safe side.”
Stan added of immersing himself in risky roles: “As actors, obviously we have to leave that all behind and then just follow the script and concentrate on the story and the scene and what needs to be done. And I think that’s what we did. I think it really depends a lot on the leadership and the director. And we were very lucky because we were in this beautifully isolating environment between these mountains every morning.”
Mungiu also paid homage to Reinsve’s absolute dedication to the role of Lisbet: “This is so different from what she did before, but she was also very generous in trying to understand. And I believe that there is something in her that corresponds to the character, and she was very generous to look inside… So I just wanted to mark this a small moment of gratitude.”
I was happy also with the first reaction of the press, but of course we need to wait some 10 years, 20 years, to see if we made a good film or not, because that’s the only thing that qualifies a good piece of cinema.
The film explores prejudice against immigrants — something that struck a chord with all involved. “A big theme in the movie is really trying to understand someone who comes from somewhere else and something else and a different culture,” Reinsve said. Playing Lisbet was, she continued, “really led by her values and the fact that they’re so different than mine, and exploring that because she lives a totally different [life], the opposite life of me. Her religion, her values really dictate her life. And I think she’s so humble to the life she lives.”
Addressing the film’s Cannes standing ovation and reviews thus far, Mungiu said, “I’m very happy for this reception. At the same time, I’ve been so many times in Cannes. I know that what matters more is for the film to have a long life, and this life has only started with the premiere. It’s good to have such a start. I was very happy, first of all, to see how people reacted during the film. People weren’t really moving too much on their chairs even if this is a long film, and I was very happy as soon as I got out of the cinema to see that the film was already provoking people to have very different ideas about what they’ve seen. And whenever you’re trying to do something which is polemic, and you speak about a society which is polarized, it’s good if you are hearing conflicting opinions once you get out.”
He added, “I was happy also with the first reaction of the press, but of course we need to wait some 10 years, 20 years, to see if we made a good film or not, because that’s the only thing that qualifies a good piece of cinema.”
To see the full conversation, click on the video above.
The Deadline Studio at Cannes is sponsored by SCAD.
Serkis will join a cast in Batman II that includes Robert Pattinson returning as the Caped Crusader, Colin Farrell as The Penguin, Scarlett Johansson, and Sebastian Stan as Harvey Dent.
EXCLUSIVE: After landing Scarlett Johansson for a new role in The Batman Part II, director Matt Reeves looks to have snagged one of her Avengers co-stars for another new role in the upcoming sequel. Sources tell Deadline Sebastian Stan is in talks to join the highly-anticipated DC Studios sequel in a role which is unknown. If a deal closes, he would join Robert Pattinson, who is set to reprise his role as the Caped Crusader in the upcoming sequel that Reeves is writing and directing.
DC Studios did not respond for request for comment.
The DC Studios pic is set to start production in the spring and will open in theaters on October 1, 2027. DC Co-bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran are producing.
Reeves’ The Batman was the first mega theatrical blockbuster for Warner Bros post-Covid after implementing a day-and-date release strategy on HBO Max. The movie starring Pattinson and Zoë Kravitz grossed $369.3 million at the domestic box office and $772M worldwide.
Stan is no stranger to the comic book pic after playing the role of the Winter Soldier for the past decade, most recently seen reprising it in the Marvel Studios pic Thunderbolts*.
He also was recently seen in his critically acclaimed role as Donald Trump in The Apprentice, which earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination for the part.