Marvel star is making risky career choices — most recently in the Cannes favorite Fjord.
When you’re a young actor, people with more power than you will label you as a type. The gag is they might do this before you know who you are in real life. In his search for what kind of guy to be, Sebastian Stan started by adopting what he calls all the stereotypical male role models: Brando, De Niro, Hoffman, Pacino. As a freshman in college, he showed up to parties in a white T-shirt and leather jacket, leaning James Dean–ishly against the doorframe like he wasn’t also a baby-faced immigrant kid who’d spent the past few years working on his Jim Carrey impression while trying to scrape off his Romanian accent. But as soon as Stan started seriously auditioning in his early 20s, it was obvious there was one thing everybody wanted from him. “Until recently, I had to battle this conception of me as being, like, the asshole character from The Karate Kid,” says the actor, now 44. “A Waspy asshole. A dick.”
One of his first jobs after college was playing the bad boyfriend in a Hayden Panettiere music video. He landed a part as the villain in The Covenant, a movie about teen-boy witches with abs. A big break was Gossip Girl, where he was cast as a slightly older degenerate gambler who gets his high-school-age friends into trouble. A way bigger break was getting cast in Marvel movies as James “Bucky” Barnes, a.k.a. the Winter Soldier, a.k.a. the childhood friend of Captain America who gets a bionic arm and goes bad (and then, eventually, good). There is a limiting factor to being so square-jawed and blue-eyed and symmetrical, which is that “smirking hot villain” is all mainstream Hollywood knows what to do with you. In recent years, though, Stan has realized he knows what he wants to do with himself.
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