Hollywood has a long history of casting and awarding able-bodied actors to portray characters with disabilities. In the Oscars’ best actor category alone, there is Daniel Day-Lewis for My Left Foot, Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything, Colin Firth for The King’s Speech and Jamie Foxx for Ray. In the history of the Academy Awards, only three disabled actors have been awarded a best performance trophy for portraying a character who has their disability.
Director Aaron Schimberg notes that onscreen portrayals of people with disfigurements, as seen in his latest film A Different Man, are still largely played by able-bodied people in prosthetics. “On the other hand,” he continues, “When I’ve cast actors with disfigurements, people have called that exploitative, which seems to run counter to this whole discussion about representation that we’re having.” For his newest film, he wanted to interrogate the complexities of that sometimes counterproductive conversation.
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Schimberg’s A Different Man, which will screen Feb. 16 at the Berlin Film Festival, follows Edward (played by Sebastian Stan), an aspiring actor with facial disfigurement who, after undergoing reconstructive surgery, starts a new life, only to become obsessed with an actor (Adam Pearson) who is playing him in a play based on his former life.
“This is a subject that I’ve been mining for my past few films. For all my films, really,” says Schimberg, whose last film, Chained for Life, is about an actress who struggles to connect with her disfigured co-star, also played by Pearson, the British actor and activist whose neurofibromatosis caused facial disfigurement.
For A Different Man, Schimberg says he wanted “to explore the idea of identity. How much of our self-definition is influenced by the way others define us, especially if the general consensus is stacked against you. Can we stand alone in upholding our own dignity against the judgment of others?”
He adds that films and storytelling can, perhaps, force audiences to confront their prejudices. “In looking at other films about prejudice, if you show a character acting prejudicial or being cruel against a person — for instance, a person with a facial disfigurement in a film — the audience is going to distance themselves from that behavior, even if deep down they may hold similar views.”
His pitch to studio A24 for A Different Man was simple: By the end of his film, Stan is going to be jealous of Pearson and audiences are going to wholly feel and understand that jealousy.
“You don’t come across a lot of scripts where you can’t predict what’s happening,” says Stan of Schimberg’s screenplay. “I thought, if I could just get what he was after with it, then I knew something new was going to come from me that I haven’t been able to do before.”
Stan is, of course, best known for his role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Bucky Barnes. While A Different Man is clearly a departure from the world of blockbuster filmmaking, he says he signed on immediately after reading the script. With a strict shooting schedule to contend with, only six weeks after Stan joined the project, he and Schimberg were beginning the film’s 22-day shoot in New York City.
But before they got to that first day in front of the cameras, they had to figure out a central element — the prosthetic that Stan would wear for the first half of the film.
“The prosthetic was something that, when I was writing the script, I thought, ‘Eventually this will get figured out somehow.’ But we’re three weeks away from shooting, and I am like, ‘What are we going to do here?’ There’s no movie without that prosthetic.” Luckily, Stan, who also acts as a producer on the film, had a solution in prosthetic designer and makeup artist Michael Marino, whose recent credits include The Batman, where he transformed Colin Farrell into the Penguin.
Stan says the prosthetic helped him to establish the physicality of Edward, how he moved and interacted with the world. “You have eyesight only in one eye, and you don’t see someone coming from the other side as quickly,” says the actor, who even briefly wore the prosthetic while walking around New York, allowing him to see firsthand how people interacted with him. The prosthetic even influenced his performance in the second half of the film, after Edward has undergone reconstructive surgery. “Even though the prosthetics would physically be gone, it would still be there for him [mentally].”
The other major challenge facing A Different Man was shooting in New York City, something that, while he was scripting the film, Schimberg was unsure he would be able to do.
“I come from an independent film background. So when I’m writing a script, I’m thinking, in any location I use for any scene, about money,” says the director, who figured he would be doubling the location in Toronto or Albuquerque. But A24 and production company Killer Films were able to make a location shoot work. While most of the film’s action takes place in apartments, black box theaters and nondescript parks, it is filled with the grunge and character that is bone deep in New York. “I actually find it to be a fairly realistic representation of New York,” Schimberg says. “But I think that came about from me trying to write my way out of New York.”
After the casting of Stan and Pearson, the production needed to find its Ingrid, Edward’s next-door neighbor, a playwright who turns her time with Edward into a stage play. After Stan signed on, he asked Schimberg if he had seen The Worst Person in the World, the 2021 Joachim Trier film that starred Renate Reinsve. “He said yes. And I said, ‘OK, we gotta get her,’ ” Stan recalls.
They did, in fact, get Reinsve, but all three performers’ busy schedules, in addition to an expedited preproduction schedule, meant stitching together a complex shooting schedule. “I think we had everyone together for two weeks,” recalls Schimberg, who adds that they had one day of rehearsal with the three central actors. But Stan was unconcerned. “I remember Aaron coming in and saying something I’ve never heard a director say before, which was so helpful at the time. [He] essentially sat down and said, ‘I wrote this thing. You guys are the actors. But we’re all here now and we’ve got to make this our own.’ ”
A Different Man premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where THR’s review of the film observed that Schimberg “manages to tie things neatly together by asking the same question, in various ways, until the very last scene: What’s in a face?”
Inside the Eccles Theater in Park City, which holds more than 1,200 people, the director said it was difficult to gauge how his movie was being received. “I really didn’t know what anybody was feeling, so it was a little bit unnerving,” he says. “But it’s also why I made the movie — so that people could bring their own experience to it.”
