Sebastian Stan said at a press conference Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival that he is “still purging” the role he last brought to the festival: playing Donald Trump in trainee.
And when he brought this film to Cannes, it was just months before the 2024 elections. Now he’s back, receiving rave reviews for his role as the Roman Christian conservative in Cristian Mungiu’s FjordTrump has been president again for more than a year. Asked by Hollywood Reporter HOW HIS UNDERSTANDING OF THE PRESIDENT HAD CHANGED IN THE INTERVENTION Stan looked down and shook his head, while the press room burst into laughter—assuming he was reacting to a question he didn’t want to answer.
Instead, Stan looked up with a fierce expression, and the room fell silent. “Honestly, it’s not just a funny thing. It’s not,” he said. “I think we’re in a really bad place. I really think so. When you look at what’s going on, which is the consolidation of the media, the censorship, the threats, the supposed lawsuits that seem to never end, but actually don’t go anywhere, you know, the writing was on the wall.”
The creative team has seen this with trainee“To the point where we were three days before the festival, unsure if the film would be at the festival — and maybe more people would be interested in the film, and I think we’ll stand the test of time for that — but we went through all that before Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. I hope that’s not the case,” he said.
in Fjordthe Marvel star has completely different hair than he did in his last outing at Cannes, but the new film is nothing short of a lightning rod. With a heavily shaved head and large bald spot, Stan plays Mihai, a conservative Christian father of five who runs afoul of Norway’s progressive and harsh child protection services, sparking debates about freedom of expression and freedom of religion that reverberate throughout the Croisette. The film, in which Renate Rensef plays Lisbet, the matriarch of the family, raises the question of who is more guilty of imposing its values on others: the conservative family that prays at school or the progressive system that takes its children away.
He received a nine-and-a-half-minute standing ovation in Monday night’s premiere and is the favorite to win the Palme d’Or.
Mungiu based the film on years of news reports, especially those he read about Norway, where immigrant children raised in traditional families were taken from their parents. Then he went to Norway and spoke to police, judges, NGOs and journalists. “What I would really like to do, as always, is to talk about something that I consider to be one of the most important issues in our contemporary global society, which is the clash of values, especially between these kind of traditional values and these progressive values,” Mungiu said. “And we see that this has divided society into groups of people who really hate each other. We say that these days we live in a global world, but we couldn’t be more divided.”
The film was not only about Romania and Norway, but also about the United States and France. “We live in a very divided society, where people have completely stopped trying to understand others who do not share the same views,” he said. “I understand progress, but I think that even a progressive society is good to doubt every now and then the values you want to impose on others. And if those values are good, you need to convince them not to impose them.”
During the press conference, Stan described how the film was a personal endeavor for him. He was born in Romania before moving to Vienna with his single mother, a pianist, and eventually settling in Rockland County, New York, where he first learned English. “On a personal level, it was definitely a trip for me to reconnect with Romania,” he said. “I left in a very chaotic way and really tried to educate myself about the country, and I found through film that I could learn more easily.”
He’s been a fan of Mungiu for years, ever since he took his mother to see the 2016 New York Film Festival’s Graduation Ceremony, and welcomed the opportunity to speak some Romanian on screen and train in Romania. He and Rensef visited Pentecostal churches to research, but he said much of his performance was based on his upbringing. “Even though my time was divided between America, Vienna and Romania, I grew up in a very traditional Romanian environment, so I understood a lot of what was going on in the script,” he said.
How we raise our children and what we pass on to them about how we were raised was on the actor’s mind a lot. He and his girlfriend Annabelle Wallis revealed they were only waiting one night before the premiere, when they went to the Kering Women in Motion dinner and revealed her pregnancy.
“I’ve been thinking about having kids and trying to understand what it means to be a parent in today’s world, and that’s fueled a lot of things,” Stan said.
When a Spanish journalist asked him if he had ever been ostracized because of his accent or language skills, Stan replied: “I think you’re talking about discrimination, right, at all levels, which kind of happens around all of us.”
“I mean, how do we all deal with it?” gold. “I think the only way to do that is to stay as honest as possible, reflect on your own morals and values, and be the example you want to see in the world.”
He said that as an actor, he was struggling to understand his role in stopping discrimination. “I’m an actor — whatever — but I’m not on the front lines, I’m not in an operating room, I haven’t been shot at,” he said. “But this is my medium, this is my path, and all I can do is try to involve myself in films that spark conversations and different points of view.” He was reminded of a saying he had once heard about art, which was that it did not have to solve problems, but only to embody them correctly. “And I think as long as we can continue to do that without fear, I think we can actually address these things.”
