A24 has released the trailer for Aaron Schimberg’s “A Different Man,” starring Sebastian Stan as a person with a facial difference who undergoes reconstructive surgery to change his appearance. Stan won the best actor prize at the Berlin Film Festival for his work in the film.
The film follows Edward, an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that causes tumors to grow on the skin and bone. Stan plays Edward in prosthetic makeup that is modeled after his co-star Adam Pearson, a real-life actor who has neurofibromatosis and has starred in films like “Under the Skin” and Schimberg’s “Chained for Life.”
After Edward has the facial reconstructive surgery, he’s praised for his new look by co-workers and others. But then he meets Oswald (Pearson), an actor who plays him in a theater show based on his life. Edward becomes obsessed with Oswald, who looks exactly like him before he had his surgery.
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The cast also includes “The Worst Person in the World” breakout Renate Reinsve, C. Mason Wells, Owen Kline and more.
At the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, Stan talked about how he would walk around New York City in his prosthetic makeup to see the way people would treat him.
“I interacted with people and it was really interesting,” he said. “It was sort of scary to see how limited the interaction is between two extremes: don’t address it or overcompensation. The only people that were the most honest were kids. I had this interaction with a little girl, and her mom is trying to do the right thing, but in doing the right thing she actually was preventing the girl from simply having an experience. She was brave and courageous, and that’s kids, right? They just want to know — they don’t have judgement. It was a learning lesson for me.”
PvNew film critic Peter Debruge said Schimberg attempts to put a “lifetime of thoughts about beauty and ugliness, attraction and disgust, identity and performance” into the dark comedy.
“Whereas the cultural conversation can be suffocatingly one-sided on these issues, Schimberg invites all perspectives in a movie that risks offending so-called political correctness,” Debruge wrote in his review. “‘A Different Man’ finds room for both Stan and Pearson to play characters with the same physiognomy, and it takes the bold route of making both men insufferable in different ways.”
The film hits theaters Sept. 20. Watch the trailer below.
