Sebastian “Winter Soldier” Stan gained 15 pounds to play a young Donald Trump in the new movie The Apprentice and even disfigured his face with makeup for another movie Stan stars in this year, A Different Man. Despite those physical changes, however, a recent Stan Variety photoshoot left us gasping, “Have mercy, zaddy!“
One photograph shows Stan’s MCU-toned arms on full display in a black tank top. Another, Stan looks brooding and introspective in a grey cardigan and white shorts with headphones on and a Walkman cassette player. Denim on denim is in this year, and Stan reclines in another Variety picture wearing a Canadian tuxedo, barefoot on white sheets. Stan shows up off those guns attached to his shoulders again in a white t-shirt, staring intently at the camera. It’s all hot enough to make us get over our ick at the idea Stan plays DonOld Dump.
We weren’t the only ones to temperature-check Stan’s photospread, either. Comments on Variety‘s X post included the following,
“I mean there’s so many things that I can say about these photos but I’ll keep it clean and just say I absolutely LOVE the Walkman,” another comment added. Meanwhile, another comment summed up what we were all thinking with no words at all.
Trump’s “smarter” than people think he is, Stan said
Speaking to Variety about his Donald Trump role, Sebastian Stan said the former president is smarter than people give him credit for. The Apprentice, with Jeremy Strong (Succession) as Trump fixer Roy Cohn, is set in the 1970s and `80s, when Trump was still an up-and-coming real estate mogul in New York, long before he switched to reality TV, or ran for office. The Apprentice is expected in theaters on Oct. 11.
While preparing for the role, Stan said he studied Trump photographs and audio recordings of younger Trump to perfect his distinctive voice and physical mannerisms. “I started to realize that I needed to start speaking with my lips in a different way,” Stan said. “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.”
Don’t call Stan’s Different Man character a “beast”
Trump role aside, Sebastian Stan fans are in for a treat this year, as he also stars in A Different Man, in theaters Sept. 20. In it, Stan underwent a significant appearance change in the role of a man named Edward with a disfigured face who undergoes surgery to restore his Stan-style good looks. Stan told a reporter who referred to the character pre-surgery as a “beast,” ” … ‘beast’ isn’t the word,” Stan said. And I think, ultimately, it’s just interesting to hear this word because I think that’s one of the things the film is saying — we have these preconceived ideas and we’re not really educated on how to understand this experience in particular.”
On his Different Man transformation, Stan told Vanity Fair, “And it really did affect everything else: my body, physicality, my perception of the world, the world’s perception of me walking around New York as Edward.” And on becoming Trump, Stan told VF, “I had two hours in the [makeup] chair in the morning and then another hour to get out of everything and then another hour to drive home at night.” Ok, we’ll admit it, we’d watch Sebastian Stan play almost any role even when his smoldering handsome face is obscured by pounds of makeup, or underneath Trump’s bizarre blonde hairdo.