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:
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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