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Just thanks God for this man.

How Sebastian Stan Survived Communism and Became Hollywood’s Most Daring Shape-Shifter

So you need somebody who can play the Winter Soldier, Trump, and Tommy Lee? We’ve got the guy.

Sebastian Stan, who can currently be seen in Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, photographed in February in Palmdale, California. Jacket by Prada; vintage T-shirt from Stock Vintage.PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMAN JEAN ROY, STYLED BY EDWARD BOWLEG III.

The sun is going down fast, and Sebastian Stan is trying to get inside a locked Romanian church. This windblown Monday in late February would have been his late father’s 70th birthday, and before the day is gone, he is determined to light a candle and say a prayer in the old man’s memory at a place that had meaning for them both. Stan was born and raised in Romania, where faith and superstition became rooted together for him. “Whenever I’m in a church, I have to go like this three times,” he says, making the sign of the cross with his right hand. “I have to do it. And I have to do it three times before I get on a plane.”

Just before we arrived at this Southern California church in pursuit of the sacred, Stan was indulging the profane. Is there another way to describe an encounter with a remote-controlled talking penis? The actor is based in New York, so when he visits LA, as he’s doing now to attend the Academy Awards, he has a full to-do list. Today, that includes a visit to the makeup studio Autonomous FX, which won an Emmy for transforming Stan and Lily James into Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson for the Hulu series Pam & Tommy. The whole day is a microcosm of what has established Stan as one of the more daring and endearing actors working today. He thinks deeply but has a wild side too.

We’ll get back to the robo-penis later.

Jacket by Dior Men; belt by Artemas Quibble; vintage T-shirt from Stock Vintage; vintage pants from Front General Store.PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMAN JEAN ROY, STYLED BY EDWARD BOWLEG III.

It’s getting late, and Stan has to hurry through rush-hour traffic to get right with God for his father’s birthday. The Biserica Ortodoxă Română Sfânta Treime (or Holy Trinity Romanian Orthodox Church) that he wants to visit to light the tribute to his father is meaningful to the Romanian immigrants who founded it, but it’s no soaring cathedral. It’s tiny, a single-story white stucco structure with a squat steeple that’s hidden behind much taller trees. Across the street is the headquarters of the Bilt-Well Roofing company, which is a comparatively much bigger operation.

Stan left Romania more than three decades ago, but it’s still a core part of him. So is the uncertainty of growing up in a place where the government dominated and demoralized its own citizens—which makes him especially attuned to authoritarianism in his adopted country of the United States. His old accent is gone, of course. Few who have seen him onscreen as the Winter Soldier in a decade and a half of Marvel movies—including the upcoming outcast team-up adventure Thunderbolts*—could find a trace of it. Stan’s character of Bucky Barnes is as all-American as his closest friend, Captain America. The character was a Brooklyn native, but Stan took on a neighboring Queens inflection for another famous (or infamous) performance, playing young Donald Trump in the scathing true-life drama The Apprentice. The role earned him both a best-actor Oscar nomination this year and the enduring rage of a vengeful, unchecked president.

Suit by Emporio Armani; shirt by Giorgio Armani; necklace and watch by Cartier. PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMAN JEAN ROY, STYLED BY EDWARD BOWLEG III.

New faces and new voices were exactly what drew Stan to acting in high school. He moved to the US in the 1990s, and—as an immigrant kid still struggling to adapt to the language and culture—it was a lot more fun to be Bum Number Two in a production of Little Shop of Horrors than it was to be himself. “I just remember how fun it was to try to change everything,” he says. Being onstage turned a shy kid into a scene-stealing extrovert—and he was good at it. His mother sent him to summer theater camp not far from their new home just outside New York City, and by the end of high school, he was being cast as the lead in Cyrano de Bergerac. He was a good-looking kid, but he still loved hiding his face beneath Cyrano’s oversized nose. “You’re dressing up, you’re putting on fake beards, you’re walking differently, you’re changing,” he tells me. “You take big swings. You take bigger swings than you do when you’re a young actor coming to LA to go on pilot season auditions and they try to cast you as yourself—and you’re only allowed to play yourself.”

“SEBASTIAN HAS ALWAYS BEEN REALLY FEARLESS,” SAYS CHRIS EVANS. “YOU CAN SEE THAT IN HIS CHOICES. HE TAKES BIG SWINGS.”

Stan prefers to push himself to the background. He is not an oversharer. He’ll talk about characters or stunts or the meaning he sees in a particular movie or TV show, but while fans know every detail about the lives of other performers they adore, Stan has built a following while keeping the specifics of his own life somewhat obscure. The pilgrimage to light a candle for his dad is something he would ordinarily have done by himself. But Stan agreed to share something of himself for this story, in defiance of the actorly part of his personality that wishes when you looked at him, you’d see someone else.

He pulls on the handle of Holy Trinity’s main doorway. It doesn’t budge. “Doesn’t look very open,” he says. He’s not ready to give up. He walks around the church’s property and finds an older man sweeping up outside the congregation’s neighboring all-purpose hall.

Stan opens his arms and addresses him with a traditional Romanian greeting of respect: “Sărut mâna…”

I kiss your hand.

Coat by Miu Miu; belt by Artemas Quibble; necklace and watch by Cartier; vintage pants by Carhartt from Front General Store.PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMAN JEAN ROY, STYLED BY EDWARD BOWLEG III.

A week later, Stan is wearing a Prada tuxedo. It’s the night of the Academy Awards at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, and instead of trying to win over a skeptical church janitor, he’s trying to reassure his fellow actors and filmmakers that he is just fine, despite losing best actor to Adrien Brody earlier in the evening. (The VF Oscar Party is off-the-record, but Stan gave us permission to set the scene.) Most well-wishers now come to him with condolences, but he didn’t expect to win, and in some ways he may have avoided a bigger headache.

Trump has made political retribution a hallmark of his new term in the White House, and he was enraged by the sheer fact of The Apprentice’s existence. The movie, written by veteran journalist and Vanity Fair special correspondent Gabriel Sherman, depicts Trump in the 1970s as a needy wannabe mogul, eager to escape the shadow of his powerful father and being taught by Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) that underhanded tactics are a shortcut to success. When the movie was released last October, a month before the election, the once and future president unloaded on it via Truth Social, calling it “a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job,” and adding: “So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want.”

It’s unlikely that Trump had actually seen the movie at that point, but Stan has little doubt that he’s watched it since. “I would put money down he’s seen it 100 fucking times, of course, because he’s a narcissist,” Stan told me the previous week. “And I bet you there’s certain things he likes about it.” Such as? “How he looked,” Stan replies with a smile.

Pants by Brunello Cucinelli; vintage T-shirt and boots from Stock Vintage. PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMAN JEAN ROY, STYLED BY EDWARD BOWLEG III.

He is too modest to say it directly, but he’s more handsome than Trump ever was, even with the prosthetic makeup that thickened the actor’s neck and dental devices called plumpers that pooched out his lips and jowls. Autonomous FX did those makeup effects too, allowing him to look more like the disco-era version of Trump. Capturing him physically, while also surfacing the scared and desperate young man beneath that exterior, is what earned Stan his Oscar nomination. “He loses his humanity. I guess that’s essentially what happens,” Stan said of the movie. “As an actor, all you’re trying to do is just look at these very human things and identify with them.”

That doesn’t mean he wants Trump to put him at the top of his enemies list. Before the Academy Awards, Stan said he was trying not to worry about potential retribution and didn’t think it would happen, unless…“I don’t know, maybe if I win the Oscar, which is like 0.0000 percent.”

“HE’S WILLING TO PLAY UNLIKABLE CHARACTERS,” SAYS JESSICA CHASTAIN. “HE’S NOT HAPPY TO JUST BE A CONVENTIONAL MOVIE STAR.”

So yes, he’s feeling fine at the party. He took with him other honors from the backslapping season, like when Jane Fonda name-dropped him while accepting a lifetime achievement award at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. “While you may hate the behavior of your character, you have to understand and empathize with the traumatized person you’re playing. Thinking of Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice,” she said.

Stan said her shout-out was “maybe better than winning an Oscar.” “I wasn’t at the SAG Awards,” he continued. “I wasn’t nominated. I didn’t go. But somebody told me to turn on the TV because Jane Fonda mentioned my name. I would never have thought in my life that she would know who I am.”

Jacket by Prada; vintage T-shirt and boots from Stock Vintage; pants by Prada; belt by Artemas Quibble; necklace and watch by Cartier. PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMAN JEAN ROY, STYLED BY EDWARD BOWLEG III.

Then there was the actual trophy he won, a Golden Globe for best actor in a musical or comedy, bestowed on him not for The Apprentice but for A Different Man, in which he plays a man with a disfiguring genetic condition who undergoes a radical medical procedure to look more “normal.” The back-to-back recognition caught the attention of Hollywood’s power brokers, including Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, who has been working with him for nearly 15 years now. “To see him winning a Golden Globe for one movie and then being nominated for an Academy Award for another movie in the same year is pretty darn impressive,” Feige says.

The Golden Globe win stirred unexpected emotions in Stan. “You never really think that you’re going to be up there,” he’s told me. “I realized from that Golden Globe moment that when it happens, it’s massive. You can’t help but reflect on everything and everyone that contributed to you getting there.”

One of them is Annabelle Wallis, Stan’s partner of several years. The couple had kept their relationship private before the Globes, when she accompanied him and got an “I love you” callout from him on the stage. Wallis joined Stan at the Oscars as well, wearing a forget-me-not blue Grecian-style gown, and he introduces her happily to me at the Oscar party. (She has heard all about our adventure trying to get into the Romanian church.) Wallis is an actor herself, best known for The Tudors and Peaky Blinders, but their relationship is not something either of them discusses. “I feel like it’s really difficult nowadays to be able to have any privacy whatsoever,” he said. “It’s the one part of my life that I try to keep somewhat for myself, even though it sort of ends up being out there.”

Stan gets that protective streak from another person who helped him get where he is—his mother, Georgeta Orlovschi, who also accompanied him to the Oscars. She raised him for many years as a single mom after she split from his father when Stan was young. “They were both very strong individuals with very strong personalities,” he says. “Neither wanted to be justified by the other. I think they both had a rebellious spirit.”

Hat by Nick Fouquet; necklace by Cartier.PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMAN JEAN ROY, STYLED BY EDWARD BOWLEG III.

His father later disappeared completely, going into exile in the States. Constantin Stan was a cargo-ship worker who helped fellow countrymen evade government persecution that pervaded Romania in the decades after World War II. “He was a bit of a hero in my town,” Stan says. “My parents were part of the youth that were standing up to Communism. My father was helping people escape the country illegally, to the point where he was a wanted man. And he himself had to flee.”

Stan grew up not really knowing the man everyone else knew by the nickname “Tino,” apart from occasional telephone calls. But if his dad could vanish, it seemed plausible that his mother might too. Then one day she did.

Stan was about eight years old when his mother fled Romania to set up a new life for them abroad. Throughout his childhood, government mismanagement and corruption had led to food scarcity, fuel shortages, and electricity blackouts. The eventual revolution culminated in the downfall and execution of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989. “I watched him get shot on television,” Stan says. “I remember that.”

The aftermath wasn’t necessarily better. “It was chaos,” Stan says, noting “how many orphaned kids were in Bucharest after the revolution because everybody didn’t have money. Nobody knew how to live. They’d been so suppressed.” He spent a year with his grandparents before joining his mother in Austria. “She came and got me when she finally had a job and established herself enough there in Vienna,” he says.

Sweater by Loro Piana; pants by Schott NYC; necklace and watch by Cartier; vintage tank top from Stock Vintage.PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMAN JEAN ROY, STYLED BY EDWARD BOWLEG III.

The anxiety he felt about losing her continued even after they were reunited. “She was working. She was playing piano at night when she could, and then she was teaching piano all day long. So at 9 or 10 years old, I was taking the trolley to school myself. I was taking the subway back myself,” Stan recalls. “Then I was coming home and I was alone, and I would have to make myself food and I’d do my homework and I’d wait for her to come home. That was a lot of alone time for a kid in a foreign country.”

He learned independence, but it scarred him too. “I remember waiting for her to get home and worrying: What if she doesn’t come home? I can see how that’s worked against me in certain ways and how it’s totally benefited me in other ways. You have a lot of time with your imagination when you’re a kid like that alone. So I feel I’m very good at using my imagination to believe certain things, which helps me in a way. But then there are times where I’m feeling a degree of uncertainty and lack of control over my life that can be paralyzing.”

“MY PARENTS WERE PART OF THE YOUTH STANDING UP TO COMMUNISM,” HE SAYS OF HIS ROMANIAN CHILDHOOD. “MY FATHER WAS HELPING PEOPLE ESCAPE THE COUNTRY ILLEGALLY—TO THE POINT HE HIMSELF HAD TO FLEE.”

Stan was around 12 when his mother began dating a man named Anthony Fruhauf, who was the headmaster of a small private high school in central New York. When they got married, Stan’s mother made plans to move with her son once again, this time to the United States. “He was really kind. My stepdad was a real influence in a good way,” Stan says. “In those early years in America, speaking English with him at home I think probably led to how I lost my accent.” He was all right seeing it go. He wanted to belong.

All this surfaced when Stan was onstage accepting his Golden Globe. “This is for my mom who left Romania in search of a better life, and for my stepfather, Tony, who took on a single mom and a grown-up kid,” he said, hoisting his award as his voice broke. Pointing heavenward, he added: “Thank you for being a real man.”

Coat by Bottega Veneta; belt by Artemas Quibble; necklace and watch by Cartier; vintage T-shirt from Stock Vintage; vintage pants from Front General Store. PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMAN JEAN ROY, STYLED BY EDWARD BOWLEG III.

Despite craving stability, Stan learned the value of taking chances, which has earned him a daredevil reputation among his actor friends. “Sebastian has always been really fearless,” says Chris Evans, who first appeared opposite Stan in 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger and costarred with him repeatedly as the Marvel Cinematic Universe expanded. “You can see that in his choices. He takes big swings. When that Trump movie was kicking around, I remember thinking, I wonder who is going to take this job? It’s just got so many strings attached to it. And I was so unsurprised when I heard it was Sebastian.”

The devil on Stan’s shoulder urging him forward was Jessica Chastain, who became a close friend after they worked together on 2015’s The Martian and later the 2022 spy thriller The 355. “When we were on set for The 355, that’s when he first told me he had had the offer to play Donald Trump. A thing about Sebastian that people might not realize is he’s very, very thoughtful, almost to a point where he overthinks things. It could cause a little bit of stress. He was like, ‘Well, what do you think? What would you do?’ I said, ‘Do it.’ I was like, ‘What do you have to lose? Take a risk.’ As long as it doesn’t cause you physical danger, if something scares you—do it.”

Chastain saw Stan do that very thing in 2017’s I, Tonya, in which he played Tonya Harding’s then husband, who hatched the scheme to sabotage her rival, Nancy Kerrigan. “When so many people are trying to make you this conventional movie star, it’s a risk to do something that isn’t that,” Chastain says. “He’s willing to play unlikable characters. I find that executives have trouble with characters that may be complex and have dark sides to them. He really embraces that. He’s not happy to just be a conventional movie star.”

Coat by Loewe. PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMAN JEAN ROY, STYLED BY EDWARD BOWLEG III.

Marvel Studios was looking for a dark side when they were casting the role of Bucky Barnes in the first Captain America movie in 2010. Stan was a relative unknown, though he’d had a recurring role on Gossip Girl as a pathological liar of a rich kid. “You could see that he has so much inside him and so much behind his eyes. I’ll never forget that,” Feige says. “I said to Stephen Broussard, who was one of the producers on Captain America, ‘He’s going to be a good Bucky, but he’s going to be a great Winter Soldier.’ ”

Bucky evolves into that villainous alter ego in subsequent MCU stories, going from fearless soldier to shell-shocked prisoner of war and, eventually, mind-controlled assassin who struggles to break his programming and redeem himself. Getting the part was beyond game-changing for the actor. “I was actually struggling with work,” Stan says. “I had just gotten off the phone with my business manager, who told me I was saved by $65,000 that came in residuals from Hot Tub Time Machine.” He’d played the smarmy bully in that comedy a year before. Now it was his salvation.

Since then, the Winter Soldier has become one of the most beloved and relatable characters in the MCU, even though his story is far from the traditional everyman narrative. Bucky resonates because he’s damaged goods—the patron saint of fuckups struggling to do right. The arc culminates in his new lead role in Thunderbolts*, with Bucky leading a team of former troublemakers and outcasts. Feige says that, without Stan, the character’s strange journey wouldn’t have been the emotional gut punch it is.

After lunch, Stan goes to his appointment at Autonomous FX. The headquarters is tucked near an ice warehouse and a scrapyard in an industrial neighborhood of Van Nuys. Stan is trying on a pair of fake teeth that slip over his perfect pearly whites. The goal is to give him a more regular-guy look for Fjord, the movie he’s shooting in Norway with filmmaker Cristian Mungiu, a fellow native of Romania.

There’s a story behind these teeth—dating back to before Stan got braces as an adult. “When I got Invisalign, I was so obsessed with them,” he says. “The more you wear them, the faster they work. So I actually wore them at the fucking Captain America: The Winter Soldier premiere. I have them in and I’m smiling with them and people can tell. I was self-conscious because my teeth were always a little….” He splays his fingers into crooked angles.

The prosthetic teeth are modeled on Stan’s own before he fixed them. Stan has another blast from his past waiting for him too. After the fitting, Jason Collins, the founder and lead creative force behind Autonomous FX, takes Stan through the workshops, where sculptors are making limbs, bodies, and demonic babies. On the shelves, busts of other actors like Christian Bale and Annette Bening, used for previous projects, stare down with vacant eyes.

Collins and his company essentially provide the level-up version of the fake beards and noses that Stan first loved about acting in high school—except occasionally X-rated. As part of this nostalgia trip, Collins brings out a plastic tub with the remains of the robotic erection from Pam & Tommy. The latex has dried out and decayed away. This penis “character” was voiced by Jason Mantzoukas and had strong opinions about the Mötley Crüe drummer’s romance with the Baywatch star. It was a risky creative choice by the showrunners but added levity to the series and was inspired by Lee’s own autobiography, in which he banters philosophically with his sex organ.

The makeup team and the actor forged a bond along the way. “It really becomes a partnership,” Collins says. “We stare at him for weeks and months at a time. So we know the physical structure. We know what the span of his legs is and all that other stuff.”

“You get to know the actor very well,” says Stan. Their earliest meeting involved figuring out how to fit a prosthetic over his actual privates and snake cables for the controls down his backside. “When I first came here, they made a replica to work on. So they had to cast this,” Stan says, gesturing to his crotch. “I remember you’re like, ’All right buddy, well, I guess it’s good to meet you.’”

Jacket by Bottega Veneta; vintage T-shirt and boots from Stock Vintage; belt by Artemas Quibble; necklace and watch by Cartier. PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMAN JEAN ROY, STYLED BY EDWARD BOWLEG III.

After the makeup shop, Stan heads for the last stop of the day, the Orthodox church. After a persuasive conversation in Romanian, the custodian agrees to unlock the chapel for him. “Vezi ca pana,” Stan says. You’ll see it’s only for a moment.

As the doors swing open, the faces of saints stare down at us from rows of miniature shrines, not unlike the busts of the famous actors in the prosthetics lab. Both places represent things Stan believes in—the ability to transform into something new and a yearning to connect with something beyond yourself.

Stan doesn’t claim to be especially religious, but the Holy Trinity chapel takes him back to that fearful time living under Communist dictatorship, when he put his faith in higher powers and prayed for the best. “We would go to church a lot when I was little,” he says. “It’s still tied into certain things for me, because I felt such a degree of powerlessness over decisions being made early on.”

STAN IS NOT AN OVERSHARER. BUT HE AGREED TO SHARE SOMETHING OF HIMSELF HERE, IN DEFIANCE OF THE ACTORLY PART OF HIM THAT WISHES WHEN YOU LOOKED AT HIM, YOU’D SEE SOMEONE ELSE.

Stan and the man he wants to commemorate with a candle were estranged for years. He and his father finally reconnected when Stan was around 18 and began visiting Los Angeles for auditions. The New York kid would save money by staying with his father, who had settled in the San Fernando Valley (not far from the makeup shop, actually) and worked, once again, in shipping. The periodic visits brought them closer, and the relationship stayed tight until his dad died unexpectedly from COVID on a trip back to Romania in 2021.

Stan sometimes thinks his father’s story might make a good movie. In Romania, Tino was legendary for sneaking contraband Western goods like blue jeans and bananas into the country while smuggling dissidents out aboard the same vessels. “He worked hard and he loved America and he believed in being free,” Stan says. “I have always made the argument that immigrants to some extent are more patriotic than even the people that are born here because they don’t take things for granted. At least that’s what I saw in my father.”

The janitor guides us to the back of the church, where there’s a small side room with a votive stand arrayed with unlit candles.

“Can you give me one second? I’ll be right back,” Stan says.

He disappears into the shadowy alcove and strikes a light.

Later, driving away from the chapel, Stan tries to explain why he felt so compelled to go there. “I think it’s just the acknowledgment of how fragile we all are. Sometimes you go somewhere where it’s really not about you. It’s a moment to let go. Turn off for a while,” he says. “You don’t have to be anything in there. You don’t have to think any which way.”

Jacket by Balenciaga; belt by Artemas Quibble; vintage T-shirt from Stock Vintage; vintage pants by Carhartt from Front General Store. Throughout: hair products by Rōz; grooming products by Tom Ford Beauty.PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMAN JEAN ROY, STYLED BY EDWARD BOWLEG III.

He says something similar via text two weeks later, when he’s in Norway, starting work on his new role in Fjord—with his new teeth that resemble his old teeth.

“The feeling is always the same. Like it’s the first time,” Stan writes. “It’s always a mix of fear and hope. It’s losing yourself. It’s a free fall. Every time.”

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