Sebastian Stan on ‘Fjord’ and Fatherhood

Photo: David Bailey for New York Magazine

When you’re a young actor, people with more power than you will label you as a type. The gag is they might do this before you know who you are in real life. In his search for what kind of guy to be, Sebastian Stan started by adopting what he calls all the stereotypical male role models: Brando, De Niro, Hoffman, Pacino. As a freshman in college, he showed up to parties in a white T-shirt and leather jacket, leaning James Dean–ishly against the doorframe like he wasn’t also a baby-faced immigrant kid who’d spent the past few years working on his Jim Carrey impression while trying to scrape off his Romanian accent. But as soon as Stan started seriously auditioning in his early 20s, it was obvious there was one thing everybody wanted from him. “Until recently, I had to battle this conception of me as being, like, the asshole character from The Karate Kid,” says the actor, now 44. “A Waspy asshole. A dick.”

One of his first jobs after college was playing the bad boyfriend in a Hayden Panettiere music video. He landed a part as the villain in The Covenant, a movie about teen-boy witches with abs. A big break was Gossip Girl, where he was cast as a slightly older degenerate gambler who gets his high-school-age friends into trouble. A way bigger break was getting cast in Marvel movies as James “Bucky” Barnes, a.k.a. the Winter Soldier, a.k.a. the childhood friend of Captain America who gets a bionic arm and goes bad (and then, eventually, good). There is a limiting factor to being so square-jawed and blue-eyed and symmetrical, which is that “smirking hot villain” is all mainstream Hollywood knows what to do with you. In recent years, though, Stan has realized he knows what he wants to do with himself.

Sebastian Stan Wants the Hard Parts

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After two decades in Hollywood, Stan has become a leading man by physically transforming himself — and by searching for lower-budget, independent, and international films in which to do it. Last year, he won a Golden Globe for his starring role in Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man as a man who undergoes a drastic procedure to change his face and ruins his life in the process. He was nominated for an Oscar for his preening, self-serving Donald Trump in The Apprentice, a film by Iranian Danish director Ali Abbasi. This fall, he stars in Fjord, directed by Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu. Stan’s character, Mihai, is a recent Romanian immigrant to Norway who, along with his wife, Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), is accused of beating their children — all five of whom local authorities place in foster care. Stan traveled directly from last year’s Oscars ceremony to the film’s set in a remote Norwegian village, where the crew swiftly shaved off his hair — because otherwise, Mungiu says, Stan is “too handsome for my kind of cinema.” When I ask Stan if he’s motivated by difficulty, he clasps his hands together and looks sly. “Seems like it,” he says. Later he admits, “I’m drawn to a situation that provokes failure.”

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has made Stan very famous to one portion of the public, while his smaller projects tend to be seen only by close followers of independent film. That leaves a wide swath of casual moviegoers with no idea who he is. When I mentioned to non-Marvel-watching friends that I would be interviewing him, reactions ranged from blank stares to “Is he the guy who played Trump?” Still, to many people he is Bucky Barnes and, therefore, a star. He’s had stalkers. He can spot a phone being poised for a photo from a mile away, and he and his partner of four years, the actress Annabelle Wallis, are pursued by paparazzi — only more so after photos revealed earlier this year that Wallis was pregnant. In late July, she gave birth to their first child. Right after the baby was born in New York, Stan had to fly to London to shoot The Batman: Part II (for a role online gossips say is Harvey Dent, which Stan refuses to confirm). Wallis and the infant, too tiny to fly, stayed behind.

When we meet on a hot Friday in West London, Stan finds himself separated from his child while promoting Fjord, a film about parents separated from theirs. His skull and chin are buzzed clean. He wears no hat and, despite the low-hanging sun, no sunglasses. The effect of this on someone whose eyes and mouth are so big and mobile is that he looks raw and unprotected, like his head is entirely face. He asked to meet on the terrace of a bistro near where he’s been staying; we are bordered on one side by soigné mums getting wine drunk and on the other by a busy road. When I tell him the Spartan salmon dish he ordered — he’s on a superhero-movie regimen — looks good, he saws off about a third of it and plops it on my plate. We are both pretending to ignore that every other driver passing us is slowing down so they can snap a picture of Stan. I’m surprised he wants to sit here, I say. “Oh my God!” he responds. (This is how he starts a lot of sentences, exclaiming at the strangeness of his reality.) “Well, here’s the thing: You can’t stop living your life. You can’t let anything stop that.” One kid parks his car right next to our table and gets out, handing us business cards for his weed-delivery service; it’s unclear whether he recognizes Stan or is just hustling. But his friend in the car shouts, “You’re the guy! You’re the guy from the Marvels with the arm!” Stan smiles. “I am some days,” he says.

Clockwise from top left: 2003: Law & Order. 2004: Twelfth Night. 2007: Gossip Girl. 2011: Captain America: The First Avenger. Photo: IMDb; Rutgers University; CW Network/Everett Collection; IMDb.

Clockwise from top left: 2003: Law & Order. 2004: Twelfth Night. 2007: Gossip Girl. 2011: Captain America: The First Avenger. Photo: IMDb; Rutgers… more
Clockwise from top left: 2003: Law & Order. 2004: Twelfth Night. 2007: Gossip Girl. 2011: Captain America: The First Avenger. Photo: IMDb; Rutgers University; CW Network/Everett Collection; IMDb.

Stan has been thinking a lot about how they fuck you up, your mum and dad, and whether it’s possible to avoid doing same. “Thoughts about what makes a good parent are very alive in me,” he says. When his baby was born, he felt a surge of connection and an intense pressure. “You feel like everything you’re doing is now maximized and has major implications and consequences,” he says. “Having had a baby and then having to get on a plane to go back to work felt like I was ruining their life.” This is the first time he’s spoken publicly about his child, and he acknowledges that he probably should, since the fact that he and Wallis wanted to have one “was a big part of my interest in the film,” he says. (Retaining the last shred of privacy he can, he tells me he’s trying not to reveal the baby’s name, sex, or birth date, offering only, “Let’s just say that, as a Leo, I’m happy to have a Leo child.”) In Fjord, Mungiu contrasts parenting styles: that of a secular, more permissive Norwegian couple with a defiant and depressed teen daughter and that of Stan and Reinsve’s characters, Evangelical Christians who seem closer with their kids despite their more punitive style. Stan describes Romanian parenting as “stern.” He was sometimes spanked as a child, but “I never ended up in a situation where I was bent over with a belt or something,” he says. Nothing serious. The bigger difficulty for him was all the moving around.

A few years after Stan was born in Constanta, a Romanian port city on the Black Sea, his parents divorced and his father, Constantin, fled the country. Constantin had helped others escape Romania illegally during Nicolae Ceauescu’s regime, and Stan has said this made his father a “wanted man.” Stan wouldn’t see him again until he was around 18. Shortly after the Romanian Revolution in 1989, Stan’s mother, Georgeta, left the country too; her 8-year-old son stayed with her parents while she tried to get a foothold in Austria. Stan knows she did her best. Even so. When he moved to Vienna to join her, he says they had to “rediscover our relationship” in a strange land where neither of them spoke the language. “I have a distinct memory of my mother holding my hand at this public school and being very upset that the teacher was telling her that I couldn’t go to school there because I didn’t understand German. She looked at the teacher as if she was saying I wasn’t good enough,” he says. The years that followed that were “a slight bit of that movie Boyhood,” he says: As his mother tried to make a life, boyfriends popped up, then disappeared. The one who stuck was an American named Anthony, an educator who married Georgeta and in 1995 brought her and her now-12-year-old son to New York, where they settled just north of the city.

Stan sees shame as an integral part of the immigrant experience, especially for children, who, after all, didn’t make the decision to move. He forced himself to shed his Romanian accent. It probably helped that he was always into doing impressions — of his grandma, his grandpa, their neighbors, whomever. His mother wondered if that meant he could be an actor, and while they were in Vienna, she got him cast in a small part in a Michael Haneke film. Stan hated the experience. But in suburban New York, exposed to the wonders of family friends’ VHS collections, he became obsessed with American movies. That led him to acting in high school and eventually to the Rutgers B.F.A. program.

The actress Dierdre Friel met and befriended Stan there. She remembers him writing and performing a piece that was full Marcel Marceau, stumbling and flailing through a landscape of invisible mishaps without uttering a word. “He looked like he was going to be Mr. Cool, Mr. Reserved, Mr. Laid-back,” she says. “But then he would do these things that were like, Oh, you’re a clown.” He was soft-spoken, gifted, a favorite of their teachers. During a semester abroad studying at the Globe theater in London, he played Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Although students were prohibited from auditioning outside the program, Stan got special permission to play a teen shooter in an episode of Law & Order. In 2002, another Rutgers friend, Justin Mortelliti, was desperate to try out for a new singing-competition TV show. “You had to take the train into the city in the middle of the night and sleep on the street to get in, and I was scared and didn’t want to do it alone,” Mortelliti says. Stan trekked out from New Jersey with him, and they lay shivering on their coats in front of the audition venue. Which is how Stan ended up auditioning for the first season of American Idol. He wore leather pants, performed “Your Song” — inspired by Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge! — and didn’t make it past the first round.

It was during this period that Stan saw his dad again. Constantin lived in Los Angeles, where he worked for a childhood friend from Romania: celebrity eyebrow maven Anastasia Soare, founder of the makeup brand Anastasia Beverly Hills and Stan’s godmother. The reintroduction was not easy. “We had our confrontational moments where you ask the questions: ‘Hey, what happened? Where were you?’” Stan says. “In my experience, Romanian men are not emotional types. They are very, very guarded — my father was. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.” After graduation, he wanted to live in New York but needed a place to stay in L.A. when making the rounds. He began crashing with his dad, borrowing his car to drive to auditions. Eventually, belatedly, the two got to know each other.

Stan’s first New York apartment was right on 42nd Street, opposite the Port Authority. He spent a lot of time running self-tapes up to his manager on 57th Street. When he booked Gossip Girl in 2007, he was delighted because he could sleep at home. For a couple years during filming, he was in a relationship with his co-star Leighton Meester, whom he later called his first “serious love.” Though the show got him recognition, he was never one of the main characters. He likens his role as bad influence Carter Baizen to being “the sixth man” on a basketball team — “the guy you throw in there in almost any situation. Always adds, always adds, but never quite makes it to the starting five.” In 2011, he was cast in his first Marvel movie, Captain America: The First Avenger. It didn’t change his life right away. “I was still struggling with money,” he says. “It just felt like this period in time when I was getting enough that I was carried along, but I wasn’t maturing.” Then he got another Marvel movie and another. Eventually, he was able not only to sustain life but to buy an apartment and take care of his mother after his stepfather died.

Stan is careful to praise Marvel, calling his character Bucky Barnes — who has, since Stan started playing him, fought in World War II, fallen into a ravine, been brainwashed, become a super-assassin, killed JFK, been deprogrammed, died, come back to life, and been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives — “a fucking cool character.” He expresses only gratitude to the higher-ups who gave him a shot. At one point, when Stan is talking about what’s special about working with Mungiu, who prefers long takes and a subdued, observational approach, he comments that cinema is amazing because it can honor moments that seem mundane in real life. Then, without my mentioning Marvel at all, he seems to intuit the contrast he’s drawing to his other work. “This is not — this is actually the opposite of a put-down of hero movies,” he says quickly. “It’s important to have the courage and the hope and the inspiration to stand up for something.”

He does still see himself as a “sixth man” in the MCU, though, and points out he’s never led a film. Recently, he only half-jokingly pitched a “Sicario-esque” Winter Soldier movie to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige. He recounts it for me in a Hollywood pitch voice, holding up both hands in front of him like “picture this”: “We keep a real small budget. It’s about a guy who thinks he recognizes someone from his past that had something to do with when, you know, he was brainwashed, and he gets obsessed with this person. He goes on a whole journey to try to figure out who this person is. It’s a thriller.” He says Feige humored him: “‘Yeah, that sounds cool!’”

Clockwise from top left: 2017: I, Tonya. 2022: Pam & Tommy. 2024: The Apprentice. 2026: Fjord. Photo: Hulu/Everett Collection; Everett Collection; Neon.

Clockwise from top left: 2017: I, Tonya. 2022: Pam & Tommy. 2024: The Apprentice. 2026: Fjord. Photo: Hulu/Everett Collection; Everett Collection;… more
Clockwise from top left: 2017: I, Tonya. 2022: Pam & Tommy. 2024: The Apprentice. 2026: Fjord. Photo: Hulu/Everett Collection; Everett Collection; Neon.

Ideas about masculinity come up often when Stan speaks about his life. I started to get the feeling that, for him, being the right kind of man means taking responsibility. This is part of why he works so much. When he won his Golden Globe last year, Stan thanked Romania, his mother, and his stepfather for taking them in and being what he called “a real man.” What he does not appreciate is guys who seem like they’re trying to compensate for something. He brings up the fact Trump recently staged a UFC event on the White House lawn: “If I decided to have a huge display with, quote, unquote, ripped muscle men and I showed up at an interview with my posse, what could you deduce about my manhood at that point or how I feel about it?” As we’re discussing this, drivers are tearing along the road next to us, engines roaring. “There they are!” Stan says, raising his eyebrows as a particularly loud car passes. When a convertible rockets by, drowning out our conversation, he throws up his hands. “That’s what I really need to feel like a man, goddamn it!” he says. “A Corvette that I can blast down a street full of families and kids!”

Stan is a hand talker, sweeping the air around him or bringing both palms to his chest to show he’s speaking from the heart. The way he moves is so loose and rubbery that when we get up and walk, strolling down the docile streets of his neighborhood, I’m surprised by how brolic he looks from the side. Although he says he deplores the culture of self-optimization because he thinks it makes everyone want to be the same, he also enjoys reading Substacks like The Stoic Manual, which applies the philosophy’s ideas in self-help-y posts with titles like “How to Deepen Your Friendships Part I.” He’s into Gabor Maté. He’s into therapy. He believes that, as an actor, “your whole life’s about trying to understand what you’re working with.”

The 2017 film I, Tonya may have been the first performance in which Stan really got to show what that was. When the script for Craig Gillespie’s Tonya Harding figure-skating biopic came across his desk, full of “complexity, nuance, humor, and heartbreak,” Stan was desperate to nail the part of Harding’s then-husband, Jeff Gillooly, a co-conspirator in the attack on Harding’s rival Nancy Kerrigan. “I worked really fucking hard on that,” Stan says. “I did all this research. I grew the mustache. I went to vintage stores and found ’90s clothing. I parted my hair. And from the second I left the hotel and got into the car and went into the audition, I was that guy. I spent so much time preparing in a way I never had before for something.” And he nailed it. His performance in the film, with Margot Robbie as Harding and Paul Walter Hauser as Gillooly’s partner in crime, Shawn Eckardt, is desperate, keening, and sympathetic, his voice warbling as he tries to evade the chaos he’s caused.

Hauser had assumed that because Stan was a Marvel guy, he was going to be too handsome and too cool to pal around with him. He was wrong. Their characters are an idiot buddy duo, and the two spent a lot of time together, inventing silly improv games, getting steaks, and “just imbibing at whatever local yokel bar” they could find near the set in Atlanta, Hauser says. During the shoot, “we shook each other up at times,” like when they were doing the scene in which Shawn tells Jeff he had his minions attack Kerrigan and Jeff explodes with rage. “Sebastian choked me up against the wall — not like ‘I can’t breathe’ but harder than anticipated,” says Hauser. “On the next take, I slapped him, almost to give him a receipt for the choking, and then the next take, he slapped me. On the fourth take, I went to slap him and he shook his head, but I just waited for an opening and slapped him again. I don’t know where the character began or ended, but I know I was doing something that most of his scene partners had never done, which is force him to get weird and ugly with it.” Afterward, Hauser approached Stan to ask if they were cool. “I got choked up because I was afraid I’d pissed him off so much he didn’t want to be my friend anymore,” Hauser says. “He looked at me and went, ‘Aw, man!’ and gave me a big hug.” Stan says working on I, Tonya was the first time he felt secure about his place on a project, integrated and supported in a greater whole. “For some reason, before, I just felt very alone in the process. I felt like I had to look out for myself, to scramble and fight for the moments and be loud,” he says. “But that movie really showed me what this could be when it works.”

Since I, Tonya, he’s figured out that the best way for him to get results is to eat, drink, and sleep his parts. He was in talks to play Trump in Ali Abbasi’s film before the project could get moving. Nothing really budged until 2022, when he played the Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, all swaggering arrested development in prosthetic nipple rings and a prosthetic penis. That performance, in the miniseries Pam & Tommy, “led to The Apprentice in a way because it gave people confidence that I could play a real person,” Stan says. He also acknowledges there probably weren’t very many other people who wanted the Trump part. The Apprentice is a lightly fictionalized reimagining of Trump’s relationship with his mentor, the right-wing attack dog Roy Cohn, tracking the real-estate heir from his first meeting with the lawyer through Cohn’s death from AIDS. Is it even possible to do a subtle Trump? Somehow, Stan does, inhabiting the physicality and voice completely, turning up the volume on the Trumpian tics as the character ages.

The same year The Apprentice came out, as the once and future president was threatening lawsuits and attempting to block its release (while also giving it free publicity by ranting about it on Truth Social), Stan released his first film with Reinsve, A Different Man, in which he wore prosthetics to play a man with a visible facial difference who feels completely marked by his appearance and unable to overcome it. He decides to take part in an experimental study that causes chunks of his skin to fall off — until he emerges with the face of Sebastian Stan. “What’s so brilliant is that he looks so uncomfortable in his own skin. It’s jarring to see somebody who looks like Sebastian seem so anxious, and that really makes the performance,” says the film’s director, Aaron Schimberg.

The story hinges on a ménage à trois involving Stan’s character, a playwright he’s in love with (Reinsve), and a cheerful, impossibly charismatic man he meets after his surgery played by Adam Pearson, who has a genetic disorder called neurofibromatosis. “The only thing Sebastian ever demanded was that we get the prosthetics right,” says Schimberg. “On day one, he was like, ‘I know the guy, and I’m talking to him’” — Mike Marino, a prosthetics designer widely considered one of the best, who’s also working on The Batman: Part II. Because Marino was already booked for their shoot days and the budget couldn’t cover his fee, Stan helped pay Marino himself and agreed to sit for makeup at 3 or 4 a.m. so Marino could work on him before heading to his day job. With so many hours left before Stan’s call time every day, Pearson encouraged him to go about his daily life to experience what it felt like with his new face. And he did — strolling around Soho, getting a coffee. “There are two ways to lose your anonymity in society and almost become public property,” says Pearson. “Have a visual difference or be really, really famous. In both cases, people feel like you owe them something.”

Even before Stan made these films, he had been exploring the possibility of working on something in Romania. He’d been following the rise of the so-called Romanian New Cinema since the early aughts, when a generation of filmmakers including Mungiu, Cristi Puiu, and, later, Radu Jude started working in a minimalist style that often wrestled with the absurdities and hypocrisies of their home country. These filmmakers were starting to win prizes at international festivals, and by the time Stan met Mungiu at a 2016 screening of the director’s Graduation, Mungiu had already won the Palme d’Or and Best Director at Cannes. (This year, he won the Palme d’Or again for Fjord.) They eventually began to talk about working together, but before that, Stan decided to produce a first-time feature by Romanian filmmaker Andreea Cristina Bortun called A River’s Gaze, about a Romanian single mother who contemplates moving abroad to provide for her teen son. Bortun, who released her film last year, says this is an increasingly common situation as well as one that resonates with Stan’s own history. “Sebastian has a very lucid perspective on what’s happening on a political and social level in Romania,” says Bortun.

Romania is, on the whole, a conservative country, where the ascendant right wing deploys the concept of the “traditional family” to justify its homophobia and is eager to amplify the resentment some Romanians feel toward Western Europe — particularly those in the diaspora who have, since the country joined the E.U., moved abroad to work difficult, low-wage jobs. Bortun points out that when a far-right candidate ran for president two years ago and attempted to leverage these frustrations to get elected, Stan recorded a video message to Romanians asking them to vote for a different candidate. (The right-winger, Calin Georgescu, ended up being barred from the final election after investigators discovered that Russia had created bots to support him online.)

None of this is mentioned in Fjord, but all of it shapes how Romanian viewers see the film. Mungiu was inspired by news stories about Romanian and other immigrant families to Norway who felt they were being unfairly targeted by the country’s child-protection agency, the Barnevernet. These stories have made headlines in Romania, particularly the case of Ruth and Marius Bodnariu, Pentecostal Christians who in 2015 were living in a small Norwegian village when they had all five of their children taken away from them after two of their older kids told people at school that their parents hit them. The Bodnarius admitted they spanked the children occasionally but denied doing more than that. Over the seven months they spent trying to get all of their children back, they became a cause célèbre both for Romanian conservatives and for Evangelical media worldwide, which claimed the family was being persecuted because they were Christian. (A BBC report found no evidence of this.) There have since been cases in Norway, Sweden, and other countries covered in a similar way; in 2023, a Bollywood studio released Mrs. Chatterjee vs Norway, a film based on the story of an Indian mother whose children were taken by the Barnevernet. Bucharest-based film critic and lecturer Irina Trocan says coverage of the Bodnarius was unavoidable in Romania, sparking protests and online campaigns and kicking off an entire line of discourse. “Some people saw it as our values and identity being denied by the cold Norwegians,” says Trocan. “But despite who was right or wasn’t, it dawned on many conservative politicians that this is a profitable topic to piggyback on, and it was politicized to deliver this narrative of ‘us versus them.’”

Mungiu cast Stan before he even started writing the screenplay, knowing he would need bigger names to get the film financed. “He had the right profile: an actor capable of delivering strong dramatic performances with a nuanced and subtle interpretation,” he says. “Besides, he is the only well-known actor in the U.S. who speaks Romanian.” Mungiu interviewed the Bodnarius as part of his research, which also included speaking to other families, activists, and social workers and attending public trials in Norway. So far, Fjord has screened for only one day in Romania, drawing record crowds. And already, conservatives have seized on the Bodnariu connection, deciding that because Fjord explores possible discrimination against religious Romanians, Mungiu must also believe the “traditional family” is under attack. One right-wing politician named Titus Corlatean, who was active in the Bodnariu protests, claimed on Facebook that Mungiu had invited him to a special screening. (Mungiu denies this; he says Marius Bodnariu invited Corlatean.) “For us Christians, Fjord is, after all, something we did not expect and for which Cristian Mungiu deserves our thanks,” he wrote. Corlatean included photos of himself with Mungiu — albeit surrounded by other people — that, as one Romanian political scientist puts it, conservatives have started circulating as a “trophy.”

Mungiu denies that either he or the film supports Corlatean’s opinions. “Because I don’t explicitly approve or condemn the positions that I bring to public debate, the supporters of these groups will always try to capitalize on that and claim this simple lack of firm judgment equals a ‘victory,’” he says. “The characters in my films lie and are as manipulative as people in real life. Judge with your own head.” In his view, “Fjord is not about Norway or Romania. It is not about a specific religion. It is about a fundamentalist way of seeing things — when you believe that you are the only one who is right and that you are entitled to impose your views on others.” Although Stan’s character, Mihai, makes passing comments about how “a little discipline” is required to keep five children in line and the couple admit to giving their children a “slap on the butt,” we never see them do this. Perhaps as a result, the Norwegian teachers and social workers in the film come off as hypervigilant and occasionally absurd. At one point, a Norwegian teacher tells the couple’s neighbor she first wanted to call child-protection services after one of Mihai and Lisbet’s younger children says in class that homosexuality is wrong; in the teacher’s opinion, it constitutes abuse to teach your children to be homophobic. At the same time, Fjord is nonjudgmental in its depiction of a blossoming romance between two girls, and protesters who come to support the Romanian family are shown as hysterical too, spray-painting warnings about Satan outside the local school.

Stan does not care to interpret the film’s politics. He likes that Mungiu is not attempting to be dogmatic. “A lot of movies today have to spoon-feed people everything,” he says. “This is someone who’s trying to present you something objectively, who seems immune or even allergic to melodrama. That was interesting to me because when I was younger, I remember flipping through scripts like, Okay, where’s the scene where I’m gonna cry? ” He plays Mihai as a man of few words who nearly trembles with repressed rage; the character’s movements are so contained that Stan says he began to feel trapped. In other ways, though, he was expanding because the film was a reimmersion into the Romanian language. “On a personal level, I felt like I was connecting with something that was very familiar and had felt distant for a long time,” he says. Every day, he spoke Romanian with the crew and director, trying to sound less like the English speaker he once forced himself to become. While he insists it didn’t make the work of acting more difficult, he says he expresses himself differently in Romanian. “It’s like writing with your other hand,” he says. “Like using a different part of your brain.” He’s starting to think part of his brain never managed to port over; certain concepts have always felt difficult for him to access or explain in English.

For both his accent and his character, he took some inspiration from his father, who died of COVID while visiting Romania in 2021. Stan was shooting in L.A. the last time he saw him. His father would come over to hang out: “We would barbecue and just talk, grilling steaks and doing manly stuff.” Stan laughs briefly but doesn’t smile. He has told a Romanian publication that he partly blamed his father’s death on the dysfunction of the country’s health-care system. “He had a very adventurous spirit. He was a rebel,” says Stan. And for a long time in my early American years, I wasn’t trying to break rules. I was just trying to sneak by. Now I feel like, in my work, I’m drawn to rule breaking. I’m more oppositional in work than I am in life. That’s something I probably took from him.”

Stan wasn’t yet a father when he shot Fjord. Now, though, he’s stuck in London until at least December. Actors’ lives have a quality of drift that is painful to reconcile with a child’s needs. Reinsve found it hard to read Fjord ’s script at first because the scenario it depicted was so devastating and so easy to imagine. She has a young son who can visit her during production thanks to the efforts of her ex, who brings him around. “The periods where I’ve been away for a couple of weeks have been really painful, and the bigger the kid is, the more of their own life they have, so it’s more difficult to leave,” she says. In her performance, “I could definitely lean into how empty it feels when you are separated.” Stan’s compromise for now is trying to get back to New York every weekend he can, even if it’s just for 24 hours. Once the kid’s immunized, Wallis and the little one will come to London to stay. “I feel kind of schizophrenic,” Stan admits. “I’ve always been all or nothing with work. I don’t know how else to do it. But now I am forced to have one foot in one world and one foot in the other.”

He has many more projects lined up: In December, he’s in yet another MCU movie, Avengers: Doomsday. A film with Chilean director Felipe Gálvez, Impunity, will shoot in England, Ireland, and Spain. He’s developing a project with Radu Jude called Frankenstein in Romania, in which he’ll play both the doctor and the monster. “When you have a kid, you start to think about providing all the time,” he says. “So … I don’t know. I’ll see how I can keep balancing these jobs that I love to do, but that’s not where you make any money. That’s all for the love of the game.” He’s reading parenting books. He sends me the cover of one he’s on now, titled The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did). Last month, he flew to New York the day before his 44th birthday so he could celebrate at home. “It was fleeting. My mom came by. We had some cake,” he says. “And then I was able to get up in the morning and, you know, hold the baby’s hand for a little while.” He flew back to London later that day.

Production Credits

• Photograph by
  David Bailey
• Grooming by
  Talia Sparrow
• Styling by
  Jason Bolden
• Tailoring by
  Martha Howard
• Wardrobe by
  Sunspel (shirt) and

• Jacques Marie Mage (glasses)

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