Category: Film
You can read Sebastian’s interview in full over at MovieWeb.com
Going into Captain America: The First Avenger, I have to imagine you were hoping to get a chance to play Winter Soldier. Were they ever discussing plans for that during the first movie, or did they come to you with the story much later?
Sebastian Stan: The whole story was brought to me before we shot the first movie. I didn’t really know where they were going to take the sequel next, or even if we were going to have a sequel, at the time. We were still making the movie, which is why when people start talking about the next film now, it’s the same thing. The movie has to come out, so I didn’t really know, at all. In the script, there were certain things about Bucky Barnes, he wasn’t written linear. There were peaks and valleys and some dark undertones, and that kind of made me feel like this is a chance to show various colors of things, depending on how it’s going to go.
I read you really embraced the training aspects of this, especially with the knives. Even before I saw the movie, that knife fight part in the trailer was one of the coolest things I had seen in awhile.
Sebastian Stan: Yeah, you’ve got to credit our stunt guys. I had this amazing stuntman, James Young, and he was teaching me everything, in terms of the knife training. Yeah, we got into it, because we had the time and we really wanted to get it. It was fun. I mean, Chris (Evans) had been in a number of action movies, but I don’t think any of us had learned this type of sequenced, choreographed type of fighting. This was something that, if there was a shot that would take three minutes, we would break it up and it took awhile. We took advantage of trying to do as much as we could.
The Winter Soldier’s look is so menacing and awesome, and you know right away this guy is bad. It was like one of those Darth Vader moments, where you see this guy and you know he’s the real deal. Can you talk about the actual costume you had to wear and the arm. Was there a lot of bulk to it, or were you still able to move around in it rather well?
Sebastian Stan: There was a lot of bulk to it. The way that the costume came together is it was made from five different pieces, and flexibility was definitely an issues, one we couldn’t have really known, because we weren’t rehearsing with the costumes on. We just saw how flexible we were once we got on set. It was tough. We went through some periods where we ripped a bunch of the costumes, just flying by the seat of your pants, a little bit. The arm was very specific. There were a couple of them, some more mobile than others. The ones that were more immobile were actually the better looking ones that looked cooler, so I always wanted to have that one. By the end, we just really adjusted to that.
Sebastian was on Good Morning America this morning to promote Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which is in theaters now! You can watch his interview below, as well as view captures in the gallery!
A very big thank you to my friend Pedro of ChrisEvansHQ.com for the video!
Television Appearances > Good Morning America (April 4th, 2014)
TooFab.com — Bucky Barnes has gone to the dark side!
Sebastian Stan returns as Captain America’s BFF in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” but he’s got a whole new look and one baaaaad personality.
Though he was presumed dead after the events in “The First Avenger,” Barnes reappears in the present day as a ruthless, brainwashed assassin with a bionic arm.
toofab’s Brian Particelli sat down with Stan before the film’s US premiere, where they talked about his return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, picking up the fast-paced fight choreography, and, most importantly, who had the best hair flip on set.
“Listen, in that department I think Black Widow’s got everybody beat,” Stan says with a laugh.
“Pretty much all of it was mine and it was a lot,” he adds, talking about his mane in the flick. “I actually kept a lot of it for a couple months afterwards for as long as I could. I felt like a whole other person and sometimes you want that.”
It’s true, he looks like a totally different person in this movie — sporting a costume straight out of the Marvel comics.
“Thank God I actually have a cool costume and it’s not like a weird one,” says Stan. “It helped everything because it was just such a transformation for me. There’s a little kid thing about it, because you’re like ‘Wow! You guys really took this off the page!'”
The 30-year-old actor says he didn’t find out his character would return until two years after “The First Avenger,” though he thinks Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige probably knew “maybe a week after the first one came out.”
He tells toofab he has a “really good time” playing this character — and loved doing the fight scenes for this sequel. Continue reading
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.