Whatever you think of Sebastian Stan, it’s hard not to look at him and immediately think: Well, I mean, he’s beautiful. Because, conventional or not—with his square jaw and Rossetti lips and little nose and cleft chin and blue eyes and thick straight hair and straight white teeth—Sebastian Stan is beautiful. What must it be like to walk through the world looking like that? It must do something to the way you move, the way you talk, the way you make decisions. Maybe there’s nothing to think about when it’s all you’ve known. But Stan has talked enough about struggling with his identity as a Romanian immigrant for the thought not to have occurred to him: the strangeness of everyone welcoming you in even when you are uncertain who you even are.
Considering his bold looks in films like I, Tonya (the mustache) and Pam & Tommy (the everything), Stan has been talking more lately about his appearance, and the act of transforming it. “Having to morph into something that’s not really you is scary, but it stops me from judging myself,” he told L’Officiel. "And the physical aspect of it, whether it's losing weight or gaining weight or changing hair color, it shifts perspective," he told Entertainment Weekly.
The perspective shift in A Different Man is his most extreme. Stan just won a Golden Globe for playing Edward, a man who has what appears to be neurofibromatosis (though it’s never identified), the genetic condition with which Joseph Merrick (better known as the Elephant Man—David Lynch’s film makes a brief appearance in the background of this one) was once falsely diagnosed. The condition causes benign tumors to grow in the nervous system and though it can manifest differently, in Edward’s case it has given him the appearance of a much older man, whose features have been weighed down by the way they have developed with and around the growths. In the film, Stan wears a prosthetic face for the first half (it took about two hours of prep every day by makeup artist Mike Marino), and he has spoken out about people’s reaction to him in costume. “It was really interesting and sort of scary to see how limited the interaction is,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “It just really is limited between two extremes, which is either they won’t address it, or overcompensation."
A now-viral moment from the Berlin Film Festival last year had one journalist referring to Edward as a “beast” (perhaps a reference to various mentions of Beauty and the Beast in the film, perhaps a language barrier, perhaps simple indelicacy), which Stan immediately shut down. “I have to call you out a little bit on the choice of words. I think part of why the film is important is because we often maybe don’t even have the right vocabulary,” Stan said, smiling and adding, “‘Beast’ isn’t the word.”
I’ve never much noticed Stan as an actor before. I don’t know if that’s to do with his limitations, or my limitations, or maybe it’s a little of both. But never more than now have I understood why actors are so keen to transform their appearance. Because the mask in A Different Man offers Stan’s performance a depth I’m unsure has ever been accessible to him before. In the film, Edward seems to be living a fairly isolated life—no family, no friends—as a struggling actor in New York City. He acts in clunkily offensive PSAs or auditions for blank-faced casting agents. He takes the subway and feels so self-conscious it’s unclear if people are actually laughing and staring, or if he just thinks they are. A beautiful neighbor moves in and her first reaction to seeing him is shock. There is a way to play this kind of existence, an existence lined with apology, and Stan does have the hunch, the downcast eyes, the trampled appearance of a person who feels invisible making themselves invisible.
At the same time, that despondency is undone by a subtle bounce beneath all that weight—a kinetic energy, a spryness. This buoyancy makes you remember it’s Stan in there, that out of his experience of the world come Edward’s array of gestures (what he has called his “Sebastianisms”)—the way he nods absently, the way he hugs himself, his restless knee, the lightly wagging finger, the occasional casual confidence (“Write me a part.”). You hear that voice and know it’s coming from under a mask. Edward’s neighbor, Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), whose beauty enables her to invade his personal space unapologetically, perfectly encapsulates this disconnect: “It’s funny ... Edward, he has an awkwardness in his own skin, so, it’s kind of brilliant in a way—seeing you, who looks like you, and you’re not yourself, you’ve got this mask, this other persona, and there’s this dissonance.”
Ingrid says that when she thinks she’s talking to another man playing Edward in a play she has written about her recently deceased (or so she thinks) neighbor. It is actually Edward, but a medical breakthrough leading to a series of Charlie Kaufmanesque procedures has cured him of his condition. In a set of body horror scenes worthy of Francis Bacon, Edward’s face dissolves—“Is it safe?” he asks the doctor. “You know my face is falling off. In clumps.”—and suddenly, as though reborn, there he is: Sebastian Stan. With this new face, Edward unceremoniously kills off his past and starts a new life as the aptly generically named Guy, a popular real estate agent (was there ever a better contemporary symbol for a deal with the devil?) When he comes across Ingrid again, he stumbles into a casting call for her play inspired by Edward. Though his first audition is atrocious, once he puts on his Edward mask—a prototype from the medical experiment (“Keep it. A reminder,” the doctor says. “Of what???” Edward responds)—he nails it. It’s like the mask frees him from the burden of his new face without the concurrent burden of the old one.
Which is when Oswald shows up. Oswald is played by Adam Pearson, the British actor who really does have neurofibromatosis and who you may know from Under the Skin or A Different Man director Aaron Schimberg’s previous film, Chained for Life. While Guy is supposed to be the improved version of Edward, here is his real foil. Where Edward seemed defined by his face, Oswald has transcended his—he is all charisma. This is a man who is pure vitality, the kind of guy who dives into everything jubilantly from yoga in the park to karaoke to saxophone to jujitsu. The definitive hail fellow well met, Oswald charms everyone he meets to the point that his looks seem to be beside it. And, fittingly, Oswald proceeds to basically climb into the skin of Edward’s life—he usurps his role in the play, but also his role in the playwright’s life (Ingrid being a woman neither Edward nor Guy could ever pin down, but with whom Oswald has a child). What must it be like to walk through the world looking like that? It depends on who you are. “You allow yourself the space to grieve it and then you move on,” Pearson himself has said of being bullied for the way he looks. “You can’t carry all this around with you forever. That would be even more soul destroying than the bullying itself.”
Oswald is so clear about his identity that when Guy keeps conflating him with Edward in the play, he never stops correcting him, “Not me, Edward.” But it makes sense for a man like that, who has never been clear on who he is to make that mistake (just as it makes sense Edward is an actor, while Oswald is only an amateur). Guy reverts back to Edward’s awkwardness in the face of Oswald’s charm offensive and the last scene has him indecisive as ever, unchanged fundamentally, as unsure as he ever was despite his physical transformation. It’s a doubly poignant conclusion when you consider Stan’s own similar struggles, but also those of writer/director Schimberg. “I’m usually embarrassed to talk about it, but I do have this cleft palate, as well as a host of other medical issues, and for better or worse—mostly for the worse—they shaped my perception of myself, and the way others see me. I’m still dealing with that, even as a middle-aged man, so that’s the foundation of all the films I make,” Schimberg told Filmmaker. “Then, I met Adam Pearson, who I worked with on Chained for Life, who is disfigured in a way that is even more visible, but who doesn’t seem to let that define him. I’m in awe of that, but it also makes me question myself. What have I been doing wrong? Could I have done everything differently?” A Different Man (and Stan’s performance within it) provides the answer. As Oswald tells Edward at the end of the film, “It’s all really down to how you frame it.”
