The actor and makeup artist extraordinaire Mike Marino unpack Stan’s dramatic prosthetics turn.
Stan needed the man who madeColin Farrellunrecognizable as Oz Cobb forThe Batmanand HBOsThe Penguinto pull off such a feat.
It was a busy street.
Sebastian Stan’s Edward before and after his transformation in ‘A Different Man’.A24 (2)
I was terrified, but I would just go get a coffee or sit.
That skill is especially prominent inA Different Man(playing now in limited release).
It changes how you stand.
Adam Pearson’s Oswald opposite Sebastian Stan’s Edward in ‘A Different Man’.A24
It changes how far away you are from people, how you look at people.
I felt oddly on my back foot more.
He would actually now have a chance to live with people’s reactions and how they were treating him.
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He would often stroll away from set on the Upper West Side in between breaks or setups.
Like, Oh s—!
Oh f—!
It was scary to experience.
It was hard to experience.
I felt powerless in those situations in some way.
And, I guess, a lot of that is how Edward feels in the film.
Other reactions were less intense, but equally informative.
“I don’t think it always comes from a bad place,” he says.
“Sometimes people just want to connect or feel okay.
It’s actually about their own experience.
It’s not even about you.
They don’t know how.”
As a 5-year-old, the movie scared Marino.
“That really made an indelible mark on my life.”
He would need that motivation for the obstacles that Stan’s look onA Different Manprompted.
“There were many technical challenges,” he recalls.
“It is very difficult to do makeup that thick where they have very thick areas.
So I had to really balance what was too big, what was too small.
I still need the movement of Sebastian to come through.
I still need his own face to drive the makeup and not have it look purely like a mask.
I studied Adam’s photos.
I really analyzed him and tried to balance how I can make it work for Sebastian.”
Stan has another transformative part coming out soon, the buzzed-about and already-controversial performance of youngDonald TrumpinThe Apprentice.
“I’ve been finding strange parallels that I never really thought about,” he remarks.
I think these last couple of roles have required a different degree of physicality.
One, obviously, is specific, a real person.
But I think about that, of course.
You have to, because everyone walks differently and everyone carries things in their body differently.
Sometimes you gain access in a different way to things by simply changing a physical aspect of yourself."
