Tuesday, September 13, 2016

A CHAT WITH SEBASTIAN STAN



Captain America: Civil War arrived in stores on Blu-ray and DVD today. I never get tired of praising this thoroughly entertaining movie. To celebrate its release on home video, I'm posting the full transcript of an interview I conducted with actor Sebastian Stan, who plays Bucky Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier. We spoke shortly after I saw an advance screening of the film, several weeks before it hit theaters. A shorter version of this Q&A appeared on the TIME For Kids website.


GLENN GREENBERG: 
I saw the movie on Thursday and I thought it was terrific.

SEBASTIAN STAN: 
Oh, great. Thank you so much.

GREENBERG:
My pleasure. Thank you! (Laughter)
Were you fan of comic books or superhero movies before you got involved with this series?

STAN: 
Well, the truth is, I didn’t grow up with comic books, so for me it was a very new sort of situation. But I definitely enjoyed getting to know the Captain America story. I’m probably a little biased, but it is my favorite one, because I think it feels the most real, you know what I mean? It’s the most relatable. And I think the movie Civil War reiterates that because it is very relatable to the world we live in now.  

GREENBERG: 
How much did you about Captain America, Bucky, and the Winter Soldier before you got the part? I assume you at least heard of Captain America.

STAN: 
Yes, I’ve always heard of Captain America, absolutely. I didn’t know anything about Bucky Barnes, I didn’t know anything about the relationship. I was educated on all that in a meeting once I got the part. Actually, I didn’t even have the part when they were talking to me about it. I think it’s a great story because they’re the oldest serving POWs. And again, it’s a story that’s always going to be relatable over time. I feel like we’ve always seen the story of brotherhood and family and kind of how war tears people apart and the uglier side of war. All those things, to me, seemed to be themes in the story.



GREENBERG: 
I was actually going to touch upon that. But before we get to that—having seen the film, I can say that in Captain America: Civil War, there are several different facets and layers to your character this time around. You get to play him several different ways. What’s your personal take on Bucky/the Winter Soldier as a character, especially in terms of where he is in this movie?

STAN: 
I think where he is in this movie is very appropriate, in terms of where we have left off at the end of The Winter Soldier. We find him in a place of question. He is questioning his own identity, he’s learning about his past, he’s suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, he’s a bit paranoid, paranoid-schizophrenic, a little bit. He’s always wondering if he’s being followed. Who can he trust? So he’s learning about his past and how to live with it, and wondering if there’s a future and what that future entails for him. And that’s sort of the journey that he has in this film—learning to live with the past and starting over.

GREENBERG: 
How would you say that working on Civil War was different from working on The Winter Soldier?

STAN: 
Just more layers to the character. A lot more intricate scenes. Practically every scene I had, [co-directors Anthony and Joe Russo] and I could debate for hours where to go. Does he remember this? Did he know this before or is he remembering this now? How much of him is here in this moment and how much is he completely under the influence of some sort of brainwashing? So there was always a question, a guessing game too. So that made it much more difficult, whereas in The Winter Soldier, it was very clear to me that we were dealing with a machine, so to speak, that’s been very programmed and trained. And here, this was an opportunity to reunite [Bucky and Captain America] and you get to see the Bucky Barnes within the guy but at the same time, you also see the effects of what he’s been through.

GREENBERG: 
I have to say, you conveyed all of that incredibly well.

STAN: 
Wow, thank you.

GREENBERG: 
I could tell, just from the expression on your face or the look in your eyes, which Bucky we were dealing with—whether it was the brainwashed Bucky, or the Bucky who went to the museum to learn about himself at the end of the previous movie, or the Bucky who remembers everything. And the tone in your voice, the way you performed each version, was really clear, incredibly straightforward, and made it easy to pick up where you were as a character throughout the movie.

STAN: 
Oh, I appreciate that, that makes me feel great. That means I did my job.

GREENBERG: 
Absolutely. There’s a big superhero battle late in the movie, where everyone is there, they’re all fighting one another—were all of the actors together for that scene, or were some of them added in later with CGI and that kind of stuff?

STAN: 
Yeah, some of them were added in later. We had, I think, a day where we had everyone. And that was sort of epic and exciting, and you can tell everybody was getting a little tingly, looking around. “Wow, everybody’s here!” We shot that over the span of four months, that whole sequence, so it was very much out of context at times. We would constantly return to it, it would always be like, “What else do we need?” “We still need this piece and that.” “We should add this and that.” So there was all this stuff, but we were always aware that it was going to be epic and a different fight sequence from what we’ve seen before.

GREENBERG: 
And what was it like, for the brief time that you were all together, interacting with so many other key cast members and players in this growing Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)?

STAN: 
So fun. So fun. It’s one of those circumstances where everybody really gets along and is just very excited to go to work. It’s definitely an experience where you pinch yourself and you wonder whether or not this is real in some way. To have these actors like Don Cheadle, Robert Downey Jr., and William Hurt—these are all actors that some of us, myself included, grew up watching. So it’s a real treat to be in the same film with them.

   

GREENBERG: 
Is there a particular message or theme that you think kids will come away with after seeing Civil War?

STAN: 
I wonder about that. They may like more characters after seeing Civil War than they did before. Or they may have different opinions about their own [favorite] superheroes than they did before. The movie sort of raises the question of who’s right. And kids will have the opportunity to choose, and maybe debate after the film and go, “Hey, I think what he was doing makes sense,” or, “Well, actually, I understand why Iron Man is doing this.” So I think it can spark a little bit of conversation, and that’s hopefully what it’s going to do.

GREENBERG: 
One of the things that I really liked was that even though they were at odds with each other, there was still a degree of respect that they had for each other, even when they were on opposite sides.

STAN: 
Yes. Of course. That was the civil part of Civil War. (Both laugh.)

GREENBERG: 
If you get the chance to play the character again, what would you like to see him do? Is there a particular storyline from the comic books, or character bit, or achievement you’d like to play out? Because in the comic books, he got to date the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) for a while, for one thing.

STAN: 
Now that I think about it, I would love one day to explore the origin and history of the Winter Soldier and Black Widow. We get little pieces of it here and there, and it’s continued here in this film. But the kids and the fans are the ones who are going to determine that, and if that’s something they’d really like to see, it may happen. But I personally would like to see that because the Winter Soldier has this other history altogether as an entirely different person, and he was the one who trained Black Widow, so just to see how that dynamic worked, I’d love to see that one day.

GREENBERG: 
I didn’t even know that part!

STAN: 
Oh yeah. He actually trained her. When you first see the Winter Soldier in the MCU, he’s already become a machine, because of the constant treatment that he’s had. The truth is, when he first started out, there was more of a person to him. Which is so crazy, and that’s why it’s like Jekyll and Hyde.    

GREENBERG: 
Clearly I’m going to have to watch these movies again a little more closely to pick up on that! (Both laugh.)

STAN: 
Marvel does that really well. They layer in these little teases, these little Easter eggs. They know what they’re doing!

© All text copyright Glenn Greenberg, 2016.    

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