Fresh Star Sebastian Stan Is Drawn To Roles That Scare Him [Interview]

I feel like we’re at the point where every time I see you on screen, I’m waiting for something bad to happen. Are you in your villain era or are you just naturally drawn to dark roles?

I don’t know, to be honest. I go to therapy. I try. [Laughs] But I don’t know, there’s so many different things that feel more out of my control than in my control when projects come together. There are so many things that I want to work on or I try to go out for and either the financing doesn’t come together or the timing is wrong, I have a lot of stories like that. But I do gravitate towards projects that I feel ask questions or make me think a certain way or scare me in a lot of ways because then I sort of put this detective hat on and I try to get in there and try to understand and try to research. In terms of, “Fresh” for example,  I had an idea going in and reading it [of] what to expect, but then it just seemed to keep offsetting me every time I thought I knew how he was going to handle something. I just felt like it was unsettling in a way that I wanted to continue to understand better. 

And then I think a lot of it comes from the company you keep and aligning with a director’s vision, someone who’s telling the story a certain way or has something very specific to say and wanting to help that person tell that point of view. And also in terms of who your partner is as you go down this journey because there’s a lot of trust and there’s a lot of pieces that have to come together and I guess I’ve been very lucky with being able to work opposite some unbelievable actors, mostly who have elevated me actually and forced me to rise to the challenge. And I think as an actor, that’s sort of what you’re looking for. I hate getting comfortable in certain things and just wanting to do the same thing over and over again and so I just try to find stuff that’s challenging, I guess or that feels so far away from me that I can at least learn something from it.

So when you’re getting into this role — I know you’ve talked about looking into serial killers and working with doctors on the subject. What was your main takeaway from that research part?

I read so much on narcissism — and we always hear this word obviously, and we’ve all come across different people and we all to some degree have a degree of narcissism. Children start out being very narcissistic in a way because it really is all about their world and it’s such a primal different experience that feels natural at that point. But then the development from there as you grow up and the influences around you and the things that happen in your life influence you a certain way. For me, I’ve always been fascinated because I think narcissism is a really real thing, and just kind of learning about that and these extreme cases [like] these serial killers, at least from the research I’ve done. And then somebody like Steve. It’s really pretty wild to learn about because there’s sort of this super ego that gets invented at some point and it’s there mainly to protect the child from an extremely traumatic experience.

So it’s as if the intention of it is good, you could argue, because it’s there for protection, but then it starts to completely take over and it often leads to these drastic behaviors and I just think when you’re looking at acting or when you’re looking at characters like this it’s important to not just write them off right away obviously for being so awful but to really understand where’s the through-line. How does someone become [that]? How does someone get there? Right, because the idea is learning so that we can perhaps prevent other things from happening in the same way. And I guess whether you have kids or not, it’s something to learn about in terms of how those kids are raised.