Random Thoughts on A Different Man (and Sebastian Stan’s Weirdo Character Actor Era)

Sebastian Stan lets out his inner Willem Dafoe in Adam Schimberg's meta-comedy drama about acting, disability, and self-hatred.

Pretty privilege is a real thing. Attractive people are considered more trustworthy, more capable, and more morally virtuous, as every fairy-tale ever written has shown. The data backs it up too. Hollywood has only reinforced the notion, all while imposing ever-limiting and cruel beauty standards on even the hottest of the species. Legendary critic Pauline Kael once said that it was the duty of cinema to show us beauty in all its forms. “It is a supreme asset for actors and actresses to be beautiful; it gives them greater range and greater possibilities for expressiveness.” That quote opens Chained for Life, the feature debut of director Adam Schimberg from 2019 that depicts the production of a schlocky horror film set in a hospital full of "freaks." He spends the entire film mocking and dismantling Kael's assertion, showing it to be both offensive and deeply boring. With his follow-up, A Different Man, he delves head-first into the idea that looks are and aren't everything.

Edward Lemuel (Sebastian Stan) is a struggling actor with neurofibromatosis. He can only land gigs in cheesy and deeply condescending workplace training videos on how to not be weirded out by people with facial differences. His new neighbour, Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), is an aspiring playwright with whom he becomes rather enamoured. Life sucks, but things change dramatically when some experimental medical treatment cures him of his condition and gives him the face of Sebastian Stan. Now, he can truly live his life, right?

Taking up the name of Guy, he becomes a successful real estate agent with a dream apartment and a slew of one-night stands notched onto his bedpost. He discovers that Ingrid has written a play, Edward, based on his life. He was born for the role. But then in walks Oswald (Adam Pearson), another actor with neurofibromatosis who has taken an interest in the play. And everyone LOVES Oswald. More importantly, Oswald loves himself. He's charming, funny, has a bunch of hobbies he's instantly good at, and is great at karaoke. He’s everything that Edward wasn’t. And everything that Guy isn’t.

There’s a delicious meanness to A Different Man. Sure, Edward has a tough life and is undeniably impacted by ableism, but he’s also a total drag who’s just not fun to be around (he tries to eat a slice of pizza with a fork and knife!) We see him audition for a role before his treatment and he’s clearly a bad actor. He’s cloaked himself in awkwardness as a shield, a pre-emptive defence against the inevitable cruelty of the world. But that’s also made him paranoid, viewing every halfway glance or cordial greeting with suspicion. He’s convinced people are avoiding staring at him on the Subway, but it could also be that this is New York and nobody cares about anything outside of their own bubble. You can’t blame him though, especially when the doctors who treat him can barely conceal their giddiness at having such an excellent guinea pig for their experimental medicine.

Becoming a certified hottie doesn’t make Edward/Guy happy. He’s still awkward and unsocial but it can be dismissed as a quirk of a cute guy when you look like that. The more that Oswald hangs around with him and Ingrid, the more he spirals. Was it really so easy? Did he just have to have a good personality and that would have solved all his problems? His self-loathing is so potent it only makes him more off-putting to those around him. There’s a case to be made that this is the ideal companion piece to The Substance, another film about how society’s impossible standards and the self-hatred they elicit make monsters of us all. Where Coralie Fargeat made that film a revelry of body horror camp, A Different Man goes for something more absurdist and surreal.

Edward’s transformation is deliberately unreal. The treatment he undergoes is obvious gobbledygook that doesn’t even try to convey scientific realism. Chunks of his face start to peel off like a banana skin, and the final reveal looks like, well, Sebastian Stan pulling prosthetics off his face. It’s a fairy-tale moment by way of troma, a highly literal version of “beauty is only skin-deep.” But even hot people have feelings, and it doesn’t solve everything to look like Sebastian Stan. You can’t escape yourself. Edward/Guy hates himself as much as Elisabeth Sparkle, and his substance is no substitute for emotional healing.

Stan’s reactions every time Oswald turns up and steals the show are hilarious, as is Pearson’s joyous yet smarmy performance as the real star of Edward’s life. Oswald, who spends the entire film dressed like Austin Powers if he was a yoga instructor, is effortlessly charming. Everyone likes him and he’s good at everything. He’s also just enough of a smug prick to keep things interesting, especially in how he talks to Edward/Guy as though they’re BFFs but he’s still planning on stealing his job, his girl, and his life. Pearson is great here, so light on his feet, like a ray of sunshine if it could humblebrag. You understand why Edward/Guy cannot stop comparing himself to him, and the potent brand of self-harm that comes from such a mental addiction. The camera zooms around Oswald like a snooping private investigator from a ‘70s drama, and he’s just living his super-cool life like a boss.

A shout-out must also go to Renate Reinsve, the Norwegian actress best known for The Worst Person in the World, as Ingrid. She’s a playwright without a story who decides to turn her brief friendship with Edward into a self-serving and cliched piece of work about how we shouldn’t judge people for what they look like in case they end up trying to commit suicide. Her play is as pitiable and sentimental as we’ve come to expect from disability narratives (and the exact opposite of what Schimberg has spent his career doing.) Everything is copy, and Ingrid ties herself in knots trying to find a way to make someone’s real life into her fiction. It’s an act of dehumanisation, one that involves distilling the messiness and uncategorisable aspects of humanity into a neat narrative. Is it even possible to do it with a marginalized group when the gaze – cinematic or otherwise – is so leering and exploitative? Schimberg is not subtle in his meta layers of this story, which makes his more caustic subversions all the funnier (and there are many laugh out loud moments in A Different Man.)

And yes, Sebastian Stan is so dang good in this. One of my favourite things in pop culture is when conventionally hot people get the chance to be goblin-weird character actors. Stan’s clearly been waiting to do this for a while, and since he now has more time in-between his Marvel obligations, he’s eagerly embracing his inner Willem Dafoe. His Edward/Guy is skittish, nebbish, and sad, a lonely little worm of a man who has no idea how to deal with the fact that he might have been the problem all along. Being hot allows him the comfort to lash out more, but not with any real catharsis. He has a pretty smile but still struggles to look human when he grins. The self-loathing is evident but so is his total emotional ineptitude. The longer the film went on, the more Stan’s exhaustion and aggravation reminded me of the Frank Grimes episode of The Simpsons. Life isn’t fair but you don’t have to be a dick about it, right?

A Different Man is a cosmic joke of a film, as much concerned with dissecting the perils of toxic masculinity as it is the hypocrisies of the disability narrative in cinema. If not every idea works it’s only because Schimberg is juggling so many at once and largely sticks the landing with most of them. It's a psycho-thriller with tons of laughs and a hero who thinks he's the only sane one in the world but is slowly proven otherwise, as well as a study of the parasitic nature of art and how disabilities on-screen can be so much more interesting and morally tangled than what we’re used to.

All that and Sebastian Stan goes full frontal. What more could you ask for?

A Different Man is in select theatres now.