A DIFFERENT MAN Trailer: Sebastian Stan Changes His Face & Life in Aaron Schimberg’s Surreal Comedy

While it may be a while before we see his portrayal of Donald Trump in The Apprentice stateside, Sebastian Stan delivers one of the best performances of the year in A Different Man. Written and directed by Aaron Schimberg (Chained For Life), it stars Stan (in heavy prosthetics) as a man living with neurofibromatosis who undergoes an experimental procedure that changes his face, leading him to find a new start in life. But after becoming fixated on an actor with the same condition (Adam Pearson), he soon realizes how life may have been better as an outsider. The Worst Person in the World breakout Renate Reinsve also stars.

The film had its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, before making stops at Berlinale (where Stan won Best Lead Performance) and New Directors/New Films.

In her review from Sundance, Melanie Addington wrote “[Schimberg] sets himself into a new category of filmmaker who is one to pay more attention to what he is doing with his challenging and unique body of work. This film is going to divide audiences into two camps – disabled and allies and everyone else who will feel extremely uncomfortable with the scenes that take us on a bumpy ride of our internal ableism and limitations we put on ourselves in fear of response of the ‘abled…’ The prosthetic work is fantastic and lends notes of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil… I would argue that it is equally about one man’s journey to overcome his internal ableism living in a world where he is clearly disfigured and then able to mask taking on an invisible nature of who he has built himself around… The tiny microaggressions of living with a part of your identity that doesn’t fit society’s norms are the heart of it.”

A Different Man arrives in theaters September 20. Check out the trailer and poster below.

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