‘The Apprentice’s Sebastian Stan On Trump & MCU ‘Thunderbolts’

When Sebastian Stan was growing up in Romania under communist rule, the risk of speaking up, or challenging the government, was truly terrifying. “I remember being very young in that country, where you would be afraid of what your neighbor might see or think or hear in your own house because they could call and tell on you,” he says.

Perhaps it’s partly that early experience that led him to step up and play a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice—a role most actors might have shied away from, in which he embodies a story so divisive and contentious it could easily have toppled his acting career. And now, post-Trump-win, Stan continues to speak out, when much of Hollywood has fallen eerily silent on the topic.  

On Sunday night at the Golden Globes, Stan was double-nominated, for both The Apprentice and the A24 film A Different Man, and he won for the latter. That winning role—of Edward Lemuel, who undergoes treatment for facial disfigurement caused by neurofibromatosis—was, in itself, another bold choice. More proof still that Stan has not rested on any laurels provided by his MCU superhero status as the Winter Soldier, AKA Bucky Barnes. Instead, he’s also chosen roles that require metamorphoses, discomfort, and the potential to incite change. As he said of A Different Man in his Globes acceptance speech, “Our ignorance and discomfort around disability and disfigurement has to end. We have to normalize it and continue to expose ourselves and our children to it. [We should] encourage acceptance.”

In a conversation via Zoom in the days preceding that Globe win, Stan likens his career choices to the cold plunges he takes every day. “I think maybe I’m doing these cold plunges in my acting life too,” he says. “I want to try and go to these places where I’m not always sure of what the outcome is going to be. I mean, it’s hell, it’s not a walk in the park. I’ve definitely lost a lot of sleep over both of these films, particularly the Trump movie. And I was kind of in a state of cortisol, of shock, for months, and especially when we were doing it. There was a tremendous mental battle that I had to face with myself every night.”

In preparing to play the young Trump, Stan says, “I would just lock myself in a room for six, seven hours a day, alone, and just try to digest as much footage of him as possible…I worked very hard to not ever approach it from doing a shtick or doing an impression. I looked at what other people were doing. I went on YouTube and I said, ‘Give me every Donald Trump impression there is. Let me just see what’s out there in the ether of this person.’” Learning about those impressions showed him the minimum mannerisms that might need to be included to serve the role, but also how to exclude reductive and obvious factors that would detract from presenting a real person.

Strangely, Stan found an ironic connection with Trump, in that he believed both he and Trump himself were continually learning to ‘play’ Trump. “He works really hard at presenting this picture of strength,” Stan says. “But clearly, if you’re really looking very closely, he’s anything but. He’s actually quite paranoid, he’s constantly, even in those wild speeches that he makes at those rallies with the music and the dancing, he’s ADD, he’s all over the place. To me, it just reads as a nervous reaction of uncomfortability in his own skin, in his own body. So, there was a level of paranoia that I think I was experiencing making that movie that actually felt very appropriate to what I think he might be… I think he himself, to some extent, has been recycling himself in a way, because I think he just sits at home and watches himself all day long. He’s actually, by nature, basically doing what I did with himself. He’s just absorbing his own mannerisms and his own thing, and he ends up kind of becoming this caricature that we see.”

That sense of being uncomfortable in one’s own skin is something Stan knows too. As an immigrant teen trying to assimilate when his family moved to New York, Stan badly wanted to fit in, but was deeply conscious of his ‘otherness’. “Coming to another country maybe in a way it helped me to become an actor because my message was to fit in, try to belong, reflect your environment, be one with it,” he says. “So, my childhood was very much like I was even afraid of my name, Sebastian. I wanted a regular kid’s name like Anthony or Chris, or something American. There was this thing about coming to America and the shame and wanting to belong and this American dream, wrestling with it and seeing, how do you make this American dream part of your life? Because in a way, it’s a burden as well, because it’s like, ‘Well, you have this opportunity where many others don’t, so what are you going to do with it?’ So, I think a lot of these things really come up for me in the work, or I think about when I approach things. Certainly, with The Apprentice, that was very true. But I think a lot of this informed my being an actor or searching for making a better relationship with discomfort, I guess.”

So, what does he think about the way in which Hollywood has gone quiet about Trump’s impending presidency? “I think there are plenty of people that are just exhausted,” he says. “It’s complicated, it’s not just one word or one answer. But in learning and talking about the movie and the reactions, it’s, ‘Hey, let’s not habituate or normalize indifference or feeling like something’s just too hot to talk about or to deal with,’ because that I think is a slippery slope and I think if we normalize that, then we can do that about anything.”

I ask him about an industry screening where afterward, an audience member approached him, furious at his choice to portray Trump. “I guess I wasn’t surprised at somebody’s reaction like that,” he says. “And to some extent, I think I welcomed it because I feel at least it’s genuine and it’s honest, and it’s true. You should feel rage. Rage is OK. At least let it come out. Let’s meet these things rather than suppressing them. I think rage is a really interesting thing, because you’re seeing how much rage there is online, right? We go back to this word that I’ve become very scared of, but I have to keep talking about, which is habituation. It’s like we’ve habituated in certain ways that are really insensitive, and people are horrible to each other. I mean, people are pushing people in front of subway trains and driving trucks [into crowds].”

Stan ultimately believes that those in power have not upheld a positive example. “I think some of it comes from people in power that we’re discussing who have allowed a certain kind of behavior. These authority figures that are supposed to be an example for us in terms of how we should conduct ourselves. And that’s another reason why I feel the movie is important—because it speaks to this permission that Trump is giving people, in my opinion, to lose their humanity. And so, the response to that shouldn’t be internalized rage either, but it should be an awareness towards what is OK and what isn’t OK towards other people.”

Compassion and empathy were key to his role in the Aaron Schimberg-directed A Different Man. His character of Edward has a condition that causes facial disfigurement and, beaten down by the stares and judgement he receives, he chooses to receive treatment, which results in giving him Stan’s regular appearance. Then Edward meets Oswald, a man with that same condition, who does not seek treatment and instead lives his life with a sense of freedom and empowerment, raising many questions about prejudice, appearance and victimization. Adam Pearson (Under the Skin), stars as Oswald and has neurofibromatosis in real life. How did Stan navigate that dynamic of playing a character who rejected the condition while his co-star is living with it?

“One of the things that was so inspiring about Adam was how truly in ownership of himself he is, really, as he is,” says Stan. “I asked him a lot of questions about his childhood and how he grew up, and fortunately Adam had the support system that my character Edward did not have. Edward was very similar to other people’s accounts I found online when I was researching. There were many people with neurofibromatosis, but also just different types of disfigurements and disabilities, that spoke a lot about being orphans, about being abandoned by their caretakers and wrestling with rage and wrestling with these feelings of alienation. And so those were closer to Edward in a way because I had to really create a backstory of what happened to him.”

During filming, Stan went out on to the streets wearing the facial prosthetics to get a sense of Edward. “I went to my coffee shop and I sat there, and I just felt people looking at me, and I felt either this total extreme discomfort, which led to, “OK, I’m just not going to engage,” or, “I’m not even going to pretend you’re here,” or the other version, which is like this pity, this overdoing everything where you don’t know whether people are being nice or sweet to you because they feel like they have to. It’s a real distrust that you have with people. It really shocked my senses and my system as a person because I couldn’t tell who was being honest or not with me.”

I ask him if he couldn’t liken that sense of distrust to how it feels to be famous. “Yeah, that’s the weird piece to it all that both Adam and Aaron wanted me to lean into, is they were like, ‘Well, you may not know what it’s like to have a disability, but you know what it’s like to be a public person, and therefore public property,’ which was a very key thing. And I thought, ‘Oh, well, yeah, I do know what it’s like to be filmed when I don’t want to be filmed.’”

Pearson also was very open with Stan about how to destigmatize disability. “Adam told me that curiosity is OK, and people, when they feel curious, they actually suppress that, and then try to pretend that they’re not, and then they do these other sort of things like sneakily look at you, whereas actually just to say, “Hey, I’m curious. What is the condition you have?’ or, ‘How are you feeling?’ or, ‘What’s going on?’ is much more invited, from what I’ve been told.”

For Stan the film is truly about “normalizing our exposure to people being different in a much bigger way.” And that its power is in its presentation of Pearson’s character. “You’re served something else than just the typical stereotypical tropes of, ‘Oh, I’m watching a disabled person be alone and in hell.’ The movie is doing a really intricate thing for the viewer, whether people are aware of it or not. Because when you are watching Adam Pearson in the film, you laugh with him, you connect with him, you sit with him.”

Next, we’ll see Stan on a break from reality and back in the MCU with Thunderbolts, slated for release May 2nd of this year. He promises this film will be “its own thing” and says, “I don’t feel you can compare it to any previous Marvel movie, and that’s because of the group of characters in this film and these actors. I couldn’t have had a better time than I did with David Harbour, Florence Pugh, Wyatt Russell, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. I mean, every single one of these people are funny, they’re generous, and so I think a lot of that chemistry did make it into the movie, and I’m excited for people to see that. It’s a little bit like The Breakfast Club. It has its own vibe, and it’s funny, and it’s real, and we did actual real stunts, like when you’re watching a truck blow up, it’s a truck blown up. It’s not CGI. Marvel really wanted this to have its own- there were many things in the movie that were actually done practically, and I think that does go a long way, because people are just smart. I think audiences just, they know.”

Stan has several upcoming projects on the docket, including a film with Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu, Let the Evil Go West, a horror thriller from Danish director Christian Tafdrup, and Justin Kurzel’s in-development Burning Rainbow Farm. As to whether any of these will present him with the cold-plunge of discomfort, Stan chooses his roles based on this proviso: “I can’t go through this life thinking, ‘Oh, I know I could have done that, but I didn’t because I was scared.’”