By Marc Tracy
For years, it seemed fair to assume that actor Sebastian Stan could make a career on both sides of Hollywood. There was dabbling in juicy supporting roles — he played the ex-husbands of both Tonya Harding and Pamela Anderson — while comfortably returning to the action-hero part for which he is best known: Bucky Barnes. As the erstwhile sidekick of Captain America, Stan has been a regular in the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies since 2011 (including “Thunderbolts*,” which hits theaters in May). There are surely worse fates than simply maintaining that balance.
“There’s a group of actors — I’ll put Colin Farrell in this group as well — that are so handsome that in some sense it works against them,” said Jessica Chastain, Stan’s friend and castmate in “The Martian” and “The 355.”
While being too good-looking a movie star may be world’s-smallest-violin territory, a whirlwind year with two standout unconventional performances now has the 42-year-old cast in a very different light. It has also already brought in some leading-man hardware, with more maybe to come.
In the surreal comedy “A Different Man,” an actor who has a condition that distorts his facial features has a medical procedure to make himself instead look classically attractive — specifically, to look like Sebastian Stan. Stan’s gutsy subversion of his looks won him the Silver Bear for leading performance at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival and the Golden Globe for acting in a comedy or musical last month.
The other movie, “The Apprentice,” is about a showy, morally questionable real estate mogul in 1970s and ’80s New York named Donald Trump. Stan plays Trump, his looks this time buried underneath both considerable physical makeup and all the figurative baggage viewers bring to the subject. From the movie’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last May, it was unclear if the film would find distribution and open in theaters, let alone be a part of awards season discussion.
But now Stan finds himself up for the Oscar in a lead acting role for playing the man who was reelected weeks after the movie’s release, going up against four performers who have received Oscar nominations before: Adrien Brody (“The Brutalist”), Timothée Chalamet (“A Complete Unknown”), Colman Domingo (“Sing Sing”) and Ralph Fiennes (“Conclave”).
“A well-crafted character built from rage and years of suppression,” is how Stan described his character in an interview last week in Manhattan. “I would argue that even though I’m sure he’s seen the movie, maybe a few times — I have no idea by the way, this is me totally speculating — one of the issues he’s probably had with the film is it really shows you the opportunistic evolution of this person.”
After the Cannes premiere, Trump, through a spokesperson, pledged to sue the filmmakers and called the movie “pure fiction” and defamatory. (Trump has not sued.)
Major studios and streaming services, from A24 and Searchlight to Netflix and Amazon, all passed. Even after “The Apprentice” was picked up by Briarcliff Entertainment and eventually made available on platforms like Apple TV+, Amazon and YouTube, the controversy surrounding it didn’t fully subside.
Trade magazine Variety could not place Stan in its prominent “Actors on Actors” series, in which acclaimed performers interview each other during awards season, because other actors “didn’t want to talk about Donald Trump,” Variety’s co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh confirmed in a statement.
“I found it distressing that the business of Hollywood didn’t have the courage to support this movie,” said Stan’s “The Apprentice” co-star Jeremy Strong, who is up for best supporting actor for playing Trump’s mentor, attorney Roy Cohn. “And I found it incredibly heartening that the community of artists and the creatives in Hollywood have acknowledged” the film with Oscar nominations.
The Trump of the first half of the movie might surprise viewers used to the 2025 version: an outer-borough scion, ambitious but unsure, who bristles under his despotic father, aspires to greater recognition and bets big on the revival of midtown Manhattan during its 1970s nadir.
The early Trump, whom Stan encountered in hours and hours of television interviews and documentaries he consumed while preparing for the role, really was rather different than the man who has dominated our national life for the past decade, Stan argued. “There is a dreamer there,” he said. “There is some idealism about America and New York and what it could be.”
As the ’70s turns to the 1980s, the movie’s Trump becomes far less sympathetic. Having disburdened himself of his need for a connected father-figure, he betrays Cohn, a gay man dying of AIDS. He rapes his wife, Ivana (who detailed an assault by Trump under oath but later clarified, “I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense”).
“What I’ve always seen in his journey, and certainly what we were exploring in the film,” Stan added, “was the solidifying of a person into stone, the loss of humanity.”
When Stan received the offer to play Trump three years ago, he had already branched out beyond Bucky Barnes with the roles of Jeff Gillooly, the ex-husband to Tonya Harding who plotted the violent attack on Nancy Kerrigan, in “I, Tonya,” and Tommy Lee, of Mötley Crüe and sex-tape fame, in the Hulu limited series “Pam & Tommy” — in other words, real people who dominated tabloid pages in the 1990s (and probably shared a few with Trump).
“The Marvel of it all,” Stan said, has contributed to his willingness to take on riskier roles. Bucky Barnes “allowed me to, one, have the opportunity to survive,” he explained. “But coming back to that character over time and getting to do certain things with that character allowed me to look for its core opposite.”
Even so, he said he took seriously the several people he polled for advice — a studio executive, a casting director — who advised him to say no to playing Trump. But ultimately he accepted the part, betting on artistic growth.
As Stan studied Trump, he found more common ground.
“I think everything he does is about power,” Stan said. “There were a lot of times growing up where I felt very powerless over my life.”
Stan was born in 1982 in Romania, then ruled by communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. His parents split up, and his father emigrated to California. His mother, a pianist, moved to Vienna to play and teach following Romania’s revolution in 1989. For more than a year, Stan was primarily cared for by grandparents. Then he joined his mother in Vienna, where he struggled to learn German and English.
He transferred to an international school where his future stepfather was headmaster. The family eventually moved to New York.
Stan’s background was something Ali Abbasi, the Iranian filmmaker based in Denmark who directed “The Apprentice,” identified as resonant with the role of Trump, Stan said.
“I understood something about the script, about this person who was so desperate to get up there that he was not going to stop at anything,” Stan said.
Beyond the profundities of Trump’s motivations, Stan also set out to master the basics — the stare, the accent, the walk, the rhythm. The goal was not to do the most precise impression so much as to feel comfortable enough to forget about doing all the tics and instead live in (and improvise as) the character.
“He did such a deep dive and became a forensic detective,” Strong said, “tirelessly absorbing, observing, studying, internalizing everything he possibly could, to the point that you sort of graft it onto yourself, as if it’s a second skin, and you tip over into it.”
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