We all love to celebrate when actors lose or gain a bunch of weight for a role. At least the Oscars do. Maybe it’s just them. At any rate, it’s worth standing slack-jawed at the impossible transformation of Sebastian Stan from Marvel superhero and Tommy Lee lookalike to a man suffering from neurofibromatosis in A Different Man. The first image from the film debuted on Stan’s Instagram.
Directed by Aaron Schimberg, the A24 thriller stars Stan under a pile of prosthetics as a man who endures a hefty amount of reconstructive surgery only to become obsessed with a man portraying him in a stage play of his life.
The person in charge of the transformation is Michael Marino, a special effects make-up artist who most recently astonished fans by turning Colin Farrell into a version of The Penguin that looks nothing like Colin Farrell in The Batman. Marino also made prosthetics for Black Swan, The Dead Don’t Die, I Am Legend, and more.
The film also stars The Worst Person In The World‘s Renate Reinsve and Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis in real life. Thus, in Synecdoche New York fashion, Stan in heavy make-up is playing a man who is meant to have neurofibromatosis, becoming obsessed with an actor playing him who actually does have neurofibromatosis. Schimberg previously directed Pearson in Chained For Life, an excellent indie film that challenged perceptions about on-screen beauty. A Different Man is still filming and hasn’t announced a release date yet.