Follow us. When Sebastian Stan was growing up in Romania in the s, he began to learn English through passive immersion. His mother, a concert pianist, would regularly play English music and language lessons on the family record player while they were going about their day. It meant that by the time the actor moved to Vienna at age eight, where he attended an American international school β and later, when he moved to New York at 12 β he had a decent jumping-off point.
In the past two years, Stan has put that method to use in a very different way. He brushed his teeth with Trump, he went grocery shopping with Trump, he spoke to friends with one earphone in, Trump still nattering away in his ear. The Apprentice lands this month in the UK, two weeks after A Different Man , an A24 production in which Stan plays an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that has caused the growth of non-cancerous tumours on his face.
But this time around it came with an added layer of stress. But Stan thrives when he leans into fear. The latter earned him Golden Globe and Emmy nominations. Trump was a different beast. Coat, shirt and tie by Ludovic de Saint Sernin. Trousers by Gabriela Hearst. Boots and gloves by Versace. Hat by Gladys Tamez. When his mother told him he was going to be leaving Vienna for the United States at 12 years old, Stan felt like the floor had fallen from beneath him.
His mother was a single parent and had met an American man and fallen in love; he wanted to bring them both to live with him in New York. Stan remembers crying in the shower in the days leading up to the move. After departing Romania a few years before, he had worked hard to forge new friendships. Upon arriving in America, he started working on his impersonation of an American teenager.
He refused to speak Romanian, even at home. He tried out every personality marker available to him at school, to figure out which one fitted: debate team, forensics, every sport he could muster, and drama, eventually gravitating towards the latter. I found my path. Still, this otherness was a part of Stan, as much as he initially tried to suppress it.
