It took a while to arrive, but 2024 was finally Sebastian Stan’s year.  Ever since the strikingly hunky actor found early fame in the wide-appeal franchises Gossip Girl and The MCU, he’s been attempting to pull off the Robert Pattinson trick of convincing cinephilic snobs that he’s more than just a handsome face.  Stan has been deliberately eroding his pretty-boy persona by taking on increasingly odd, unlikeable roles in titles like I, Tonya, Fresh, and The Bronze, but audiences have yet to take him seriously by any other name than Bucky Barnes.  It’s clear to me that 2024 was the critical breakthrough in that effort, with Stan earning many impassioned accolades for his two most recent film roles in The Apprentice and A Different Man.  Weirdly, that career boost may have been indirectly assisted by the recent re-election of Donald Trump, whom Stan portrays as a young man in The Apprentice.  Or it was at least assisted by his fellow actors’ cowardice on the subject of Trump, since Stan vented that he was invited to participate in Variety‘s annual “Actors on Actors” interview series, but nothing ever came of it because no actor (or at least no actor’s publicist) dared to discuss Trump or the election on the record.  This news item led to a fresh new wave of critics praising Stan’s fully committed portrayal of the president-elect as a young ghoul in training, reinvigorating discussion of a film that had for the most part faded into the Awards Season background since it premiered at Cannes.  It’s not all just empty political posturing, either; he deserves the praise.

In The Apprentice, Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi (Border, Holy Spider) attempts to diagnose the illness at the heart of contemporary American politics by pinpointing the exact moment when Donald Trump transformed from human being to monstrous caricature.  Trump is already a shit-heel capitalist at the start of the film, when Sebastian Stan is introduced as a racist landlord collecting rent payments & shutting out Black tenants in 1970s New York City.  The punk, disco, and street noise of the era appear to rattle young Donny just as much as his legal troubles and his father’s withheld affections.  Then, the figure of Roy Cohn appears from across a crowded barroom, played like a beckoning Count Dracula by Succession star Jeremy Strong.  In the first third of the film, Strong’s verbal & physical mannerisms are more closely aligned with the SNL-parody version of Trump we’re all used to, and the acting challenge of the piece is for Stan to gradually grow into the role as he learns from his vampiric mentor.  His transformation from status-obsessed dork to the most powerful carnival conman in America is physically manifested in peculiar contortions of the mouth and verbal jabs of one-upmanship against his own previous sentences while bragging to the press, and he learned it all from watching Cohn do the same.  What Abbasi & Stan most clearly understand about Trump is how unfortunate it is that he’s a funny guy in addition to being an evil one, so that The Apprentice ends up becoming a kind of It’s Always Sunny-style dirtbag sitcom featuring talented actors playing despicable ghouls.  It’s not especially insightful as a political text, but it is impressive as an acting showcase, which is exactly what Sebastian Stan needed to break through into critical legitimacy.

The only hindrance to The Apprentice announcing Sebastian Stan’s arrival as a formidable actor is that he only gives the second best performance in his own movie, as he’s often outshone by Jeremy Strong’s scenes-stealing performance as Roy Cohn.  Funnily enough, that actor-vs-actor tension is the exact conflict that torments Stan’s lead character in his actual-best performance of the year.  In A Different Man, director Aaron Schimberg ventures further into the ethical & psychological labyrinth of rethinking onscreen disfigurement & disability representation that he first stepped into with Chained for Life, this time with less third-act abstraction.  Sebastian Stan does incredible work building complex layers in the lead role as a failed actor with neurofibromatosis, which hides his face under a mountainous mask of noncancerous tumors.  After an experimental drug chemically removes those tumors in a miraculous transformation that reveals Stan’s Hollywood Handsome face, he remains a failed actor, finding that his lack of confidence & charisma had little to do with his disfiguring medical condition.  Then enters Adam Pearson (Chained for Life, Under the Skin) as the world’s most affable guy, who charms every room he walks into despite the fact that his own neurofibromatosis remains untreated.  Pearson is hilarious as the carefree bloke who completely wrecks Stan’s entire life simply by being pleasant company, but it’s Stan’s performance that affords the movie most of its emotional complexity.  It’s impressive to watch him intentionally play someone who is disastrously bad at acting in a movie where we can all clearly tell he’s a great actor, maybe even with potential to become one of our best.

A Different Man is a great, darkly funny comedy about the tensions between internal & external identity, teased out through the pronounced artifice of stage theatre.  By the time Stan is wearing a 3D rendering of his former disfigurement as a mask while playing a fictionalized version of himself on-stage, it’s clear that Schimberg has created something incredibly complex here, and he found an actor who was up for the task.  A Different Man is a much smaller, quieter film than The Apprentice, which made enough of a stir to be publicly threatened with lawsuits by its subject’s legal team the week of its premiere.  That threat certainly contributed to the good will behind critics’ defense of Stan’s right to discuss his craft in portraying Trump onscreen, but A Different Man is still the title of the pair that’s more likely to land on hipper publications’ Best of the Year lists.  The Apprentice is, at heart, a kind of phony drama that excels solely as an acting showcase for its two leads, who make great use of the opportunity; it’s Awards Season fluff.  By contrast, A Different Man is the real deal; it’s cinema.  In combination, they suggest that Sebastian Stan has finally achieved the creative success he’s been seeking as an actor ever since he first achieved financial success as a handsome face.  Let’s hope all these critical accolades only embolden him to get weirder & more off-putting, since he’s such a joy to watch in that mode.

-Brandon Ledet