At first glance, it looks like Sebastian Stan went through a standard list of easiest paths to an Academy Award, and his eyes lit up at the top two: Look different, or impersonate a famous person. If you can do both at once, all the better. This fall, Stan was on movie screens with two movies within weeks of each other, doing one, and then both. In A Different Man, he plays a man with neurofibromatosis, a condition that causes multiple large but noncancerous tumors; in The Apprentice, he plays a man with a far more dire genetic condition known as membership in the Trump family. Specifically, Stan plays Donald Trump in the ’70s and ’80s, well before he became the 45th or 47th president of the United States.
Stan, you may recall, is Marvel-ready handsome, most famous-ish for playing Bucky Barnes (also known as the Winter Soldier) in the Captain America movies and various adjacent Marvel projects. In other words, he has exactly the manner of good looks that the Academy loves to see altered by make-up and/or an impression. How does this man not have an Oscar in the bag? Hell, if he held one of the movies for 2025, maybe he could have won two in a row!
Yet with Oscar nominations due out this morning, Stan is a longshot fifth-slot contender more than a slam dunk; rather than complementing each other for the “you had a good year” effect, A Different Man and The Apprentice seem, if anything, at odds with each other, possibly leaving voters unsure of where to cast their votes. They’re also badges of honor representing some of Stan’s best work ever, so it’s only natural that he’ll probably be passed over for awards.
Though The Apprentice has made far more at the worldwide box office (albeit still not very much), critics and now streaming audiences seem to have chosen A Different Man, which recently hit its subscription-streaming window on Max. This is sort of a heartening development, because it’s by far the more difficult movie of the two, in a way that’s often delightfully antagonistic of its on-paper awards chances. Stan plays Edward, who despite his unusual condition aspires to work as an actor in New York. His next-door neighbor Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) is even a playwright, but he’s timid about attempting to take their friendship any further. But then doctors are able to offer Edward a miraculous procedure that rids him of his tumors. Edward jumps at the chance, and doesn’t stop there; faking his death, he reinvents himself as “Guy” and starts his life over.
Photo: Everett Collection
Yes, the elaborate makeup job is something of a feint; Stan spends most of the movie playing a man as conventionally handsome as, well, Sebastian Stan – though he does don a prosthetic mask simulating neurofibromatosis when he’s cast in the play Ingrid winds up writing about Edward (without realizing she’s cast this unrecognizable version of Edward to play himself). Edward/Guy is also vexed by the sudden presence of Oswald, another man with neurofibromatosis (played by Adam Pearson, who has the condition in real life) who has all the confidence and charisma that Edward lacks, in either form. The whole thing is far more Charlie Kaufman-esque, lightly surreal and sometimes bordering on dream/nightmare logic, than it is an inspirational story about the triumph of the human spirit. Edward doesn’t like himself very much as the movie starts, and, if anything, he becomes more frustrated and lonely after his transformation (and Stan’s anti-transformation), possibly because he now has something to hide.
There’s transformation at the heart of The Apprentice, too; when the movie joins a younger Trump in the 1970s, he’s an unformed version of the blustery quasi-showman unafraid to voice a high opinion of himself. This younger Trump has the coarseness and some of the baseline self-confidence – not the same level, but he yearns for a business deal that can prove his worth to his gruff father, without much evidence that he actually has any skills in that area – but lacks the forcefulness of personality, the ruthlessness that bulldozes over everything else. in the movie’s telling, he learns this from attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), and by the movie’s jump to the 1980s, Trump has applied those lessons to his business, his family, his life… at what price, etc.
Photo: Briarcliff Entertainment / Courtesy Everett Collection
The movie doesn’t ultimately have a lot of depth, because Trump himself doesn’t, either – but to this end, Stan’s performance takes the “character” about as far as possible. He obviously doesn’t much resemble Donald at any age, so he needs to really embody Trump with, if not necessarily precision, some degree of continuity, and his work early on in the movie, where you can see a sort of messy outline of the future, more familiar Trump – his own lousy SNL-style impression of himself – is remarkable. A lot of thought and technique obviously went into it, and the movie was largely shunned by studios, seemingly out of fear of Trump reprisal.
There might be a hint of that resistance in Stan’s lack of awards attention for The Apprentice, too. But it’s more that both of his 2024 movies actively undermine popular awards narratives about what constitutes good acting. In A Different Man, Stan begins the movie having transformed himself, via some impressive makeup, into living in someone else’s skin, but he winds up making his personal default setting – a handsome guy who looks like he could be on TV or in movies – so deeply uncomfortable, even as it will look superficially familiar to anyone who has seen the actor before. He spends more time in different hair and makeup to play Trump, but it’s not to perform a flawless imitation of one of the world’s most famous people, but rather to strip away some of that familiarity and offer a greater understanding on what’s beneath. Counterintuitively, at least as far as Hollywood biopics are concerned, there’s little empathy involved in this process. We don’t find out that Trump is a sad, wounded little boy, even though the ingredients are there; we also don’t find out that Edward is a beautiful soul underneath his initially unconventional looks. Stan’s 2024 performances don’t strip away his good looks so much as they reveal the terrifying void that refuses to fully swallow them up.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
