Playing an actor with a facial disfigurement who gets an experimental treatment that transforms his appearance but doesn’t help his career has won Sebastian Stan his first Golden Globe, for “A Different Man.”
“Our ignorance and discomfort around disability and disfigurement has to end now,” Stan said while accepting his award. “We have to normalize it and continue to expose ourselves to it and our children, encourage acceptance. One way we can do that is continuing to champion stories that are inclusive. This was not an easy movie to make.”
The director Aaron Schimberg’s dark comedy was released by A24 but wasn’t one of the studio’s most high-profile projects this year. It is a satire about Edward (Stan), who, after getting a new face, discovers that his former neighbor (Renate Reinsve) has written a play inspired by him. Unfortunately, she now doesn’t recognize him and doesn’t think he is the right person for the lead in her show. Instead, she is captivated by Oswald, played by Adam Pearson, an actor with neurofibromatosis.
“A Different Man” was not the only movie that garnered Stan a Globe nomination this year. He was also up for best actor in a drama for his transformation into a young Donald J. Trump for Ali Abbasi’s biopic, “The Apprentice.” (Adrien Brody won for “The Brutalist.”) That film focuses on Trump’s relationship with the lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn in the 1970s and ’80s. Speaking of “The Apprentice” during his acceptance, he said it was a movie he was “lucky to be a part of and that I am proud to be in.”
For a time it was unclear whether “The Apprentice,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, was ever going to hit theaters. Trump, then running for president, threatened to sue. It was ultimately released by Briarcliff Entertainment in October. Speaking to The Times about the decision to play Trump, Stan said, “for some reason every time somebody said, ‘Don’t do it,’ it made me want to do it more.”
Referring to both “The Apprentice” and “A Different Man” on the telecast on Sunday, he said, “These are tough subject matters, but these films are real and they are necessary and we can’t be afraid and look away.”
He ended the speech by dedicating the Globe to his parents: “This is for my mom, who left Romania in search of a better life and gave me everything, and for my stepfather, Tony, who took on a single mom and a grown-up kid. Thank you for being a real man. Golden Globes, I love you.”
