Sebastian Stan launches his campaign(s)

Sebastian Stan has two films out this year, A Different Man and The Apprentice. Both have earned him the highest praise of his career so far, including the Silver Bear for acting at the Berlin International Film Festival for A Different Man. And despite the controversy surrounding it—threats of lawsuits from Donald Trump and his campaign, as well as Hollywood distributors reluctant to release it—The Apprentice is part of the Oscar conversation. Stan has been involved with Oscar-bound films before, such as I, Tonya, and he’s an Emmy nominee, but this is the first time he himself has been the center of Oscar talk, and now with a cover profile in Variety, he’s officially launching his campaign.

With A Different Man hitting theaters now, and The Apprentice out next month—though distributor Briarcliff Entertainment had to use Kickstarter to raise funds to support the film’s theatrical campaign—Stan’s Oscar campaign has officially begun. The Variety profile is about seventy-thirty weighted in favor of The Apprentice, which goes to that film’s greater Oscar visibility. Yes, its distributor is comparatively tiny, but it has controversy, a star director in Ali Abbasi, and three star leads in Stan, Jeremy Strong, and Maria Bakalova (who plays Ivana Trump) to boost its profile. We’ll have to see how the academy receives the film—election exhaustion is real—but odds are, if Stan can go the distance on the trophy trail, it will be with The Apprentice.

To that end, he’s talking process, from showing reporter Daniel D’Addario the hundreds of videos on his phone he used to reference Trump’s physicality, to talking about walking around the streets of New York in the elaborate facial prosthetics required for A Different Man. What comes through, though, isn’t that Stan is a Method-obsessed asshole, even when Jeremy Strong shares an anecdote about how they both stayed in character on the set of The Apprentice. What comes through is Stan’s sympathy for his subjects.

For those of us following his career in its third decade, that isn’t new. Stan defined his niche early on by playing assholes you felt sorry for anyway, which he turned into a career-defining role in the MCU as villain turned reluctant hero Bucky Barnes. There’s almost always a core of humanity in his characters that makes them understandable, if not relatable—with one, notable exception. Sebastian Stan is GREAT at playing rich assholes with the soul-destroying accuracy of someone who spent most of his early life in proximity to wealth, seeing behind the curtain at the void hidden by quiet luxury and generational wealth. 

When Stan isn’t interested in humanizing his subjects, such as playing Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev in Dumb Money and approximately half his performance as Tommy Lee in Pam & Tommy, there is nothing behind his eyes, but the affectations are flawless. He can suck the humanity right out of a character and leave nothing but a loathsome performance of relatability. One of the only arguments in favor of making The Apprentice is just to see how far he can take that ability.

However, in defense of making The Apprentice, Stan says, “When someone says, ‘Why do we need this movie? We know all this,’ I’ll say, ‘Maybe you do, but you haven’t experienced it. The experience of those two hours is visceral.”

But we have experienced it. We’ve experienced it for nine years at this point (in the political arena, never mind Trump’s decades of celebrity before that). Trump’s political persona is designed to appeal to our worst selves, which either fires you up or revolts you, either way, it’s a visceral reaction. I understand Stan’s point, that there is still something to be mined, something we can gain from seeing Trump’s early rise to prominence fictionalized in this way, I’m just not sure I agree. I’ll let you know after I see the film. 

You can see the shape of the coming Oscar campaign, though. Physical transformation—a 15-pound weight gain and letting go of his Marvel physique—commitment to a seemingly impossible project that took years to pull together, intense subject study, staying in character, improvising on set. Even his defense of Marvel, however sincere, is angled to remind people the role those films play in the industry at large:

“They’re a big part of what contributes to this business and allows us to have smaller movies as well. This is an artery traveling through the system of this entire machinery that’s Hollywood. It feeds in so many more ways than people acknowledge.” 

That’s part of the problem, a not insignificant portion of the industry resents that they rely on cape sh-t to prop up smaller movies that don’t make billions (much like the publishing industry doesn’t like to admit the role romance novels play in keeping the whole machine going). But Stan’s diplomacy is notable—he won’t be drawn on badmouthing Marvel, even as he’s moving into a true leading-man era, he won’t sh-t talk the role that made everything else possible. 

We’re still in September, it’s still early, and SO much of Sebastian Stan’s Oscar campaign depends on what happens with The Apprentice next month. But there is a very real chance he’ll still be in the mix months from now, and this is the launchpad of Sebastian Stan’s Oscar campaign. 

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