Forgot to add this to the site in the last few days. Sebastian and Jeremy Strong get interviewed by Bryan Tyler Cohen regarding ‘The Apprentice’ and Trump.
Entertainment Weekly – The actor and makeup artist extraordinaire Mike Marino unpack Stan’s dramatic prosthetics turn.
Sebastian Stan was so determined to work with Oscar-nominated makeup artist Mike Marino on his film A Different Man that the actor was willing to undergo a social and professional experiment.
As Edward, the 42-year-old Marvel star would play an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis, or NF1 for short, who undergoes an experimental procedure that radically changes his face, only to then emotionally spiral out of control when he loses the part he was born to play to Oswald (Adam Pearson), someone with NF1 who lives a much fuller life than Edward ever led, pre- or post-procedure. Stan needed the man who made Colin Farrell unrecognizable as Oz Cobb for The Batman and HBO’s The Penguin to pull off such a feat.
Since Marino was already busy on Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Stan walked the few blocks from his apartment in New York City’s SoHo district to Marino’s home every morning around 4 or 5 a.m. “Then you just wait till they’re ready for you on set,” Marino remembers saying to him. On some of those days, Stan would kill time by wandering Manhattan in full makeup until his call time. “I walked up and down Broadway, basically,” Stan, sitting in the New York offices of studio A24, tells Entertainment Weekly. “It was a busy street. I was terrified, but I would just go get a coffee or sit.”
Stan doesn’t consider himself to be a physical actor, and yet his body of work might suggest differently. Even when the costume shoulders the bulk of the transformation, such as playing Tommy Lee in Hulu’s Pam & Tommy, his body language molds to match the look. That skill is especially prominent in A Different Man (playing now in limited release). “Even alone, being able to only look out of one eye and then having one ear more covered immediately changes a lot,” he says of Marino’s makeup effects. “It changes how you stand. It changes how far away you are from people, how you look at people. I felt oddly on my back foot more. It’s a defensive reaction because you want to be prepared in case something’s coming, that you have enough time to react.”
“What we get is such an incredibly passionate, skilled actor that can hide within a true character,” Marino tells EW in a separate conversation on Zoom from his SoHo apartment, part of which serves as the mini studio where Stan’s makeup application occurred. “He would actually now have a chance to live with people’s reactions and how they were treating him.”
That experience informed Stan’s entire performance, and it became important for him to do so, even outside of the mornings’ wait time. He would often stroll away from set on the Upper West Side in between breaks or setups. “New York is pretty evolved in a lot of ways, but I still got some big reactions from people,” he recalls. “Like, ‘Oh s—!’ ‘Oh f—!’ ‘Look at that!’ It was scary to experience. It was hard to experience. I felt powerless in those situations in some way. And, I guess, a lot of that is how Edward feels in the film.”
Sebastian Stan transforms in the discomforting drama A Different Man
Other reactions were less intense, but equally informative. While standing at a stoplight, for instance, Stan noticed the difference between those pedestrians avoiding eye contact completely, compared to those trying to discreetly steal a look or offer him a forced smile — all bystander reactions that director Aaron Schimberg incorporates into the movie. “I don’t think it always comes from a bad place,” he says. “Sometimes people just want to connect or feel okay. It’s actually about their own experience. It’s not even about you. It’s like they’re in that moment feeling something that’s funny to them and they’re trying to deal with it. They don’t know how.”
Marino wanted to be involved with A Different Man thanks to his love of the 1980 film The Elephant Man, loosely based on the life of Joseph Merrick, who lived with a facial disfigurement. As a 5-year-old, the movie scared Marino. But as he fell in love with the art of makeup transformations on screen, he came to see it for what it was: “a beautiful” and “touching story,” he describes. “That really made an indelible mark on my life.”
He would need that motivation for the obstacles that Stan’s look on A Different Man prompted. “There were many technical challenges,” he recalls. “It is very difficult to do makeup that thick where they have very thick areas. So I had to really balance what was too big, what was too small. I still need the movement of Sebastian to come through. I still need his own face to drive the makeup and not have it look purely like a mask. I studied Adam’s photos. I really analyzed him and tried to balance how I can make it work for Sebastian.”
Sebastian Stan calls out journalist who refers to his new character with disfigurement as a ‘beast’
Stan has another transformative part coming out soon, the buzzed-about and already-controversial performance of young Donald Trump in The Apprentice. Because he’s now promoting both that film and A Different Man simultaneously, it’s been interesting for him to think about the ways in which he approached both jobs.
“I’ve been finding strange parallels that I never really thought about,” he remarks. “There’s some similar themes being explored in terms of truth, self abandonment, denial of reality to some extent. I think these last couple of roles have required a different degree of physicality. One, obviously, is specific, a real person. But I think about that, of course. You have to, because everyone walks differently and everyone carries things in their body differently. Sometimes you gain access in a different way to things by simply changing a physical aspect of yourself.”
The greatest compliment he received for that kind of work on A Different Man, even more than the glowing praise he’s seen from the critics, came from Pearson’s mother. “After she saw the film, she was like, ‘All I ever wanted was for someone to walk in his shoes for one day, to know what it’s like, and you were able to do that,'” Stan remembers of their exchange. “I came close to that, I guess, in a way, to feel that kind of invasiveness that he probably felt at some point in his life, walking around.”
Two more press interviews from ‘A Different Man’ are now online. Click below to view, I’ve also added screencaps to the gallery.
How do you even begin to play a character like Donald Trump? One of the most polarising figures of the 21st century has, at various points, been a general celebrity-adjacent public persona; a reality TV host; then, one of America’s most divisive politicians. For Sebastian Stan – whose on-screen political subterfuge has so far been of the fictional kind as the MCU’s Winter Soldier – that was one of the biggest challenges of The Apprentice. No, not the business-flavoured series that Trump hosted in the US, but the title of Ali Abbasi’s new film, dramatising Trump’s early years.
As Stan tells Empire, the process of parsing everything that swirls around Donald Trump – the anger, the adoration, the hate-him-or-love-him obsession – while synthesising what needed to come across in The Apprentice was one hell of a challenge. “Working on it with Ali was like riding a psychotic horse through a blazing stable,” the actor says. It was a role that not only required getting inside Trump, but also assessing everything outside of him too. “We’re talking about somebody that everyone has an opinion about, that everyone has an impression of, that everyone has strong feelings for. I had to distance myself from that, but also I was paying attention to how he has been portrayed,” Stan explains. “So I watched everything. I watched stuff that impersonators did. All the things. But I also just had to go towards the collaboration and the vision that I was sharing with Ali.”
The result is a film that explores the moulding of the Trump we know under the wing of New York attorney Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong), dialling into the man behind the maelstrom. “The film normalises him. To some degree,” notes Stan. “There’s a preference to speak about him in a very selective, sort of distanced way. Like he’s this separate entity from the rest of us humans here on Earth. He’s either God, in the skies, blessed by everything, or he’s like Satan incarnate into the depths of the Earth. And the truth is, he is a human being. The movie shows there is much more here to relate and understand than I think we’re willing to admit. And to me, there’s a journey of watching a man turn to stone over a process of time.”
Read Empire’s full The Apprentice story – speaking to Sebastian Stan and Ali Abbasi about their provocative Donald Trump origin story – in the 40 Years Of The Terminator issue, on sale Thursday 26 September. The Apprentice comes to UK cinemas from 18 October.
The trailer for ‘Thunderbolts*’ has been released along with the artwork. I’ve also added 1080 x screencaps to the gallery.
New Yorker – After a long tour of duty in the Marvel universe, the Romanian-born actor is conquering the festival circuit, with starring roles in “The Apprentice” and “A Different Man.”
The actor Sebastian Stan glanced approvingly at the neon signage and old-school menus at the Pearl Diner, in the financial district, the other day. He’s lived in and near New York since he was twelve—around the time Donald Trump swapped his first wife, Ivana, for Marla Maples—and has watched the city evolve. “It’s funny. It’s changed, but it’s also the same buildings,” he said. “And then you’re, like, ‘The buildings are there, but you are not the same.’ ”
Stan took off a white ball cap and ordered coffee with cream; he was jet-lagged, fresh from the Deauville American Film Festival, where he’d received the Hollywood Rising-Star Award. “Rising” is a stretch for the forty-two-year-old, who’s appeared in a dozen Marvel projects, but Stan has lately reached a different echelon. In May, he went to Cannes for “The Apprentice,” in which he plays seventies-era Trump. In Berlin, he’d won the Silver Bear, an award whose previous recipients include Denzel Washington and Paul Newman. “Everyone was, like, ‘Oh, the Silver Bear!’ ” Stan said. “Then you go back and you’re, like, ‘Do we know what the Silver Bear is in America?’ ”
The prize was for his role in “A Different Man,” Aaron Schimberg’s surreal black comedy, which nods to “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Stan stars as a man whose lifelong disfigurement is miraculously reversed; the shoot included a grisly three-and-a-half-hour session spent peeling off chunks of his face.
“The Apprentice” demanded a transformation of a different sort. At the diner, Stan pulled out his phone and swiped through an album labelled “DT physicality”—a hundred and thirty videos of Trump, which capture his tiniest gestures and his over-all mien. Marinating in Trump content was, Stan said cheerfully, “a psychotic experience.” He watched the clips so many times that when the director, Ali Abbasi, asked him to improvise in a scene about marketing Trump Tower, he could rattle off the stats: sixty-eight stories of marble in a peachy hue chosen by Ivana, because, as the real Trump put it in a promo, “people feel they look better in the pink.” (It turned out that he’d also memorized Trump’s lie: the tower is actually fifty-eight floors.)
Growing up in Communist Romania, Stan had just an hour of TV news each night; New Year’s Eve was an event because it meant twelve hours of programming. His instinct for mimicry—he had a habit of imitating family members and neighbors—was the earliest tell that he might be an actor. After he and his mother fled to Vienna, in 1989, Stan got his first credit, in a Michael Haneke film—an experience that nearly put him off show business. “I stood in line with, like, a thousand kids, for I don’t know how many hours—which I hated,” he said. “If I could fucking meet Haneke now, it would be amazing!”
When the family moved again, to America, he experienced pop-culture shock. He binged every movie he’d missed—from “Back to the Future” to “Ace Ventura”—in a pal’s basement. Another friend roped him into the school play. “My high school was really, really small, so I didn’t have a lot of competition,” Stan said. “They were, like, ‘Please be in the play!’ ” Soon he was playing Cyrano himself.
After stints on Broadway, and on “Gossip Girl,” Stan was scooped up by Marvel. “I’ve been lucky to play a character for fifteen years,” he said. The blockbuster paychecks freed him up to explore edgier material. “I, Tonya,” in which he played the ice-skater Tonya Harding’s dirtbag husband, was a turning point. “It allowed me to see that a good director will bring out more in you than you can,” Stan said. It was also his first time portraying a real person—a feat that he repeated in “Pam & Tommy,” as the Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, and now in “The Apprentice.”
“It’s like learning a piece of music,” Stan said, of nailing an impression. “You’ve got to start out slow—it requires practice. Suddenly, you’re getting it more. You’re still making mistakes—but you’re playing the music. You’re playing the music every day until you can do it in your sleep. That’s when the fun starts.” He sliced the air for emphasis, then caught himself and grinned. “And sometimes it’s months later at a diner, and you’re, like, ‘Why am I doing that with my hands?’ ”
Published in the print edition of the September 30, 2024, issue, with the headline “Trumpier.”
Makeup artist Mike Marino warned Sebastian Stan that transforming him for his latest role in A24’s “A Different Man” would require much more from the actor than just wearing a mask.
It would be a transformation that would require him to live in the character’s shoes.
In the film, which opened Friday, Stan plays Edward, a man with neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that causes tumors to grow on the skin and bone. He undergoes medical treatment to change his appearance and radically transforms. Things are going well until he meets Oswald, played by Adam Pearson. Oswald is everything he’s not – confident, funny, popular and charismatic.
Before they began, Marino knew he would have to cover at least one of Stan’s eyes and one ear. Says Marino, “I warned him. I said, ‘We’re going to coat your entire head, hair and everything with glue, and it’s going to be hot and uncomfortable.’”
The two-time Oscar-nominated makeup artist took photos and live-cast Stan. In addition, he took 3D scans of the actor’s head and printed a 3D version of him. Marino also took a scan of Pearson and 3D-printed his face for reference. “I began the process of what I thought could work on Sebastian, but there were technical limitations to where his mouth, eyes and ears were,” says Marino. “I had to proportionally balance what I could do with Sebastian as makeup, as design not just to copy and mirror Adam’s face.”
Once the sculptures were complete, Marino made the molds and cast the silicone. “We had developed a soft material that was very lightweight and translucent, and I had pre-painted everything with an airbrush ahead of time so that Sebastian would come over to my studio, and it was about a two-hour process of gluing him into this makeup,” explains Marino. Once Marino had completely applied everything, Stan was carrying an extra two pounds on his face.
With Marino working on another project at the time, Stan would have to come in early and would leave for his other job. “Sebastian had hours before he had to go to set. So during that time, he was now living in this makeup in New York City, wandering around, living an experience of what Adam may be living. He got an authentic view of how people perceive you and look at you when you have something on your face, or something that’s different,” says Marino.
Speaking about that experience, Stan says, “On Broadway, one of the busiest streets in New York, no one’s looking at me. It’s as if I’m not even there.” The other reaction was worse: “Somebody would immediately stop and very blatantly hit their friend, point, take a picture.”
Marino’s makeup went through four different stages. For the first part, Marino intensified the paint job and added in scabs and crusty pieces of skin that were flaking off.
At one point, Edward’s skin has become so scabby and as Marino says “almost-cocoon-like, that he could stretch it.” Marino took a soft makeup cast and glued it onto Stan. “It’s dripping off and it’s hard to hold its form. The day we did that, I had him lean back, and glued that makeup on, and when he was upright, it was dripping, and completely hanging off. Marino explains he created a “secondary design of a transitionary stage where the face is slightly Sebastian and slightly Edward. It’s this mid-stage where his chin is still twisted and his eyes pulled down, and it’s underneath that makeup as he’s peeling it off. We added lumps that lessen with scabs, and when that comes off, we’re finally at Sebastian’s normal state — his face.”
But it doesn’t end there. Oswald’s presence makes Edward yearn to go back to who he was. His only way of doing that is by wearing a mask. So, Marino sculpted another iteration that was designed as a mask that Edward could put on and take off.
Marino hopes “A Different Man” is a film audiences watch because of its important message. “With makeup, we can take it off, and peel it off. Adam can’t. There is this real amazing beauty to someone who has that appearance, who cannot be like everyone else, and it’s shown in the film how cool and awesome he is.” Marino continues, “It’s important to view beauty differently. By nature, it should not be about how someone looks. It’s about their soul, how they feel and who they are.”
Slant Magazine – The actors discuss their physical and philosophical approaches to the self-reflexive tale.
Saying an actor was “born to play this role” might get bandied around flippantly when describing a virtuosic performance, but writer-director Aaron Schimberg refuses to stay skin deep when deploying the phrase like a dagger twice in A Different Man. The dramatic physical transformation of Sebastian Stan’s Edward, a downbeat New York actor with facial disfigurement, at the film’s midpoint becomes an opportunity for a meta-reflection on the events of the first half. A staged dramatization of his experience by Renate Reinsve’s playwright Ingrid presents Edward—now unrecognizable from his previous self due to facial reconstruction surgery—with the ultimate opportunity to embody someone he was quite literally born to play.
But trying to square the confident swagger of his new persona, “Guy,” with the version of himself that he left behind traps Edward within a hall of mirrors. As self-consciousness eats away at the flailing actor, his part gets usurped by Adam Pearson’s charismatic Oswald, a man born with neurofibromatosis, which has disfigured his face. While he doesn’t share Edward’s experiences, Oswald proves more capable of conveying the truth of his life on stage.
These bitter, brutal ironies that pervade A Different Man function like a grenade thrown into conversations about identity and representation on screen. But in a film full of calculated contradictions, arguably the most central to the success of Schimberg’s work is the sincerity required by Stan and Pearson in their parts. Mere mortals cannot settle whether they were “born to play” Edward and Oswald, yet both actors deliver turns as deeply felt as they are embodied.
In a brief conversation ahead of A Different Man’s theatrical release, I spoke with Stan and Pearson about how they approached Schimberg’s self-reflexive exploration of transformation, acting, and performance both physically and philosophically.
I’ve added photos from the NY Premiere of ‘A Different Man’ as well as new stills from the film the gallery. Ads and and a few clips from the film are also below.
I’ve also added videos of the ‘A Different Man’ ads and clips below click to watch.