Sebastian Stan revealed in a new cover story for Vanity Fair that his acting career was more or less on life support when he landed the role of Bucky Barnes in 2011’s “Captain America: The First Avenger.” The role changed Stan’s career. Not only has he stayed with Marvel for well over a decade (he next headlines the summer tentpole “Thunderbolts“), but the MCU gave him bankability as an actor to help get various acclaimed indies made like last year’s “A Different Man,” which won him a Golden Globe, and the Donald Trump movie “The Apprentice,” for which Stan was nominated at the Oscars for best actor earlier this year.
“I had just gotten off the phone with my business manager, who told me I was saved by $65,000 that came in residuals from ‘Hot Tub Time Machine,’” Stan said about the state of his career when the Marvel offer came in.
Marvel Studios co-president Kevin Feige said that despite being a relative unknown and best known for his brief stint on “Gossip Girl,” Stan appealed to him because “you could see that he has so much inside him and so much behind his eyes. I’ll never forget that. I said to Stephen Broussard, who was one of the producers on Captain America, ‘He’s going to be a good Bucky, but he’s going to be a great Winter Soldier.’”
Stan has always been a proponent of Marvel, telling GQ UK last year: “I’ve never been part of a company that puts so much heart and thought into anything. If Marvel was gone, it’d be such a big hole to try and fill up. Don’t just go out there and shit on something without offering something better.”
Marvel fans largely rejected the studio’s 2023 offerings as critical duds like “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “The Marvels” flopped at the box office. The latter title became the studio’s lowest-grossing movie in history. But the studio rebounded in a huge way last year with “Deadpool & Wolverine,” which grossed $1.3 billion worldwide to become the highest-grossing R rated release in history. “Thunderbolts” and “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” hope to continue the box office upswing for Marvel this summer.
In an interview for a Variety cover story last fall, Stan said that while some movie fans continue to criticize the quality of the MCU and the franchise’s seismic effect on movie culture, he sees them as crucial to the entertainment industry as a whole.
“It’s become really convenient to pick on [Marvel films],” Stan said. “And that’s fine. Everyone’s got an opinion. But they’re a big part of what contributes to this business and allows us to have smaller movies as well. This is an artery traveling through the system of this entire machinery that’s Hollywood. It feeds in so many more ways than people acknowledge.”
“Thunderbolts” opens in theaters May 2 from Disney and Marvel Studios.