In a new cover story from VARIETY, actor Sebastian Stan speaks with Chief Correspondent Daniel D’Addario about portraying Donald Trump in The Apprentice. Stan also discusses the film’s divisiveness in Hollywood, A Different Man, his time on Gossip Girl, Marvel’s contributions to Hollywood, and more.
Stan on preparing to play Trump:
“I had 130 videos on his physicality on my phone. And 562 videos that I had pulled with pictures from different time periods—from the ’70s all the way to today—so I could pull out his speech patterns and try to improvise like him. [Director Ali Abbasi] could come in on the second take and say, ‘Why don’t you talk a little bit about the taxes and how you don’t want to pay?’ So I had to know what charities they were going to in 1983. Every night I would go home and try not only to prepare for the day that was coming, but also to prepare for where Ali was going to take this…I started to realize that I needed to start speaking with my lips in a different way. A lot of that came from the consonants. If I’m talking, I’m moving forward. The consonants naturally forced your lips forward.”
On The Apprentice’s divisiveness in Hollywood:
“The Apprentice” didn’t sell for months after Cannes partly because Trump’s legal team sent a cease-and-desist letter attempting to block the film’s release in the U.S. while the fest was still ongoing. Entertainment corporations from Netflix to Disney would be severely inconvenienced if the next president came into office with a grudge against them. The film was finally sold to Briarcliff Entertainment, a distributor so small that the production has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money so that it will be able to stay in theaters. Stan chalks up the film’s divisiveness to a siloed online environment.
“Everything with this film has been one day at a time. There are a lot of people who love reading the [film’s] Wikipedia page and throwing out their opinions. But they don’t actually know what they’re talking about. That’s a popular sport now online, apparently.”
Unprompted, Stan brings up the idea that Trump is so widely known that some might think a biographical film about him serves no purpose.
“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. It’s something you can hopefully feel—if you still have feelings.’”
On walking around New York City with the prosthetics for A Different Man:
In “A Different Man,” Stan plays a man afflicted with a disfiguring tumor disorder, which required his face to be hidden behind extensive prosthetics. The days were particularly long because prosthetics artist Michael Marino was only able to apply Stan’s makeup in the early morning.
“Even though I wasn’t shooting until 11 a.m., I would go at like 5 in the morning to his studio, or his apartment,” Stan recalls. The hidden advantage was that Stan had hours to kill while made up like his character, the kind of person the world looks past. “I wanted to walk around the city and see what happened. 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.”
On his Gossip Girl days:
“It was the first time I was in serious love with somebody,” he says. (He dated the series’ star, Leighton Meester, from 2008 to 2010.) “Walking around the city, seeing these same buildings and streets—life seemed simpler.”
On Marvel’s contributions to Hollywood:
“It’s become really convenient to pick on [Marvel films]. And that’s fine. Everyone’s got an opinion. But 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. Sometimes I get protective of it because the intention is really fucking good. It’s just fucking hard to make a good movie over and over again…In the last couple of years. I’ve gotten much more aggressive about pursuing things that I want, and I’m constantly looking for different ways of challenging myself.”
Read the full Sebastian Stan Variety interview here.
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