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Sebastian Stan told in a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival that he’s “still purging” from the role that last brought him to the festival: playing Donald Trump in The Apprentice.
When he brought that film to Cannes, it was just months before the 2024 election. Now he’s back, getting rave reviews for playing a Romanian Christian conservative in Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, and Trump has been president again for over a year. Asked by The Hollywood Reporter how his understanding of the president has changed in the intervening time, Stan looked down and shook his head, as the press room exploded in laughter — assuming he was reacting to being asked a question that he didn’t want to answer.
In Fjord, the Marvel star has a very different hairline than in his last Cannes outing, but the new movie is no less a lightning rod. With a severely shaved head and sizable bald spot, Stan plays Mihai, a conservative Christian father of five who runs afoul of Norway’s progressive, and draconian, child protective services, sparking debates around freedom of speech and freedom of religion that have been echoing up and down the Croisette. The film, with Renate Reinsve as the family’s matriarch, Lisbet, raises questions of who’s more guilty of imposing their values on others: the conservative family that’s praying in school or the progressive system that’s taking their children away.
It received a nine-and-a-half-minute standing ovation at its Monday night premiere and is the current front-runner to win the Palme d’Or.
Mungiu based the film on years of news reports, particularly ones he’d read about Norway, in which children of immigrants raised in traditionalist families were taken from their parents. Then he went to Norway and spoke to police, judges, NGOs, journalists. “What I really wish to do, like always, is speak about something that I consider to be one of the most important issues in our contemporary global society, which is this conflict of values, and especially between these kind of traditional values and these progressive values,” Mungiu said. “And we see that this led to the splitting of the society into groups of people that really detest each other. We say that nowadays we live in a global world, but we couldn’t be more divided.”
“I mean, how are we all dealing with it?” he went on. “I think the only way to do it is just to remain as honest as possible, and to think about your own morals and your own values, and to be the example that you, that you want to see in the world.”
As an actor, he said, he struggled 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’m not being shot at,” he said. “But this is my medium, this is my lane, and all I can do is try to involve myself in movies that bring up conversations and different points of view.” He was reminded of a quote he heard about art once, that it doesn’t have to solve problems, but just embody them correctly. “And I think as long as we can continue to do that fearlessly, then I think we can actually push back against those things.”
Source: Hollywood Reporter
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