Sebastian Stan, who also serves as an executive producer, and Adam Pearson star in A24’s A Different Man. The new thriller is now playing in select theaters and will be released nationwide on October 4.

Aspiring actor Edward undergoes a radical medical procedure to drastically transform his appearance. But his new dream face quickly turns into a nightmare, as he loses out on the role he was born to play and becomes obsessed with reclaiming what was lost.

“We got on Zoom really early on in this sort of creative process to be like, ‘Okay, here are both of our experiences,’ and I’m really candid in a no-holds-barred kind of way. I have this philosophy and it’s my philosophy, I’m not creating a monolith or talking through our community here, I was like, ‘The two easiest ways to lose your anonymity in a society are to either have a disfigurement or become famous,’” Pearson told me. “And so, whilst Sebastian might not understand the level of invasiveness I face with things like pointing, staring, camera phones, like social media’s got an opinion on everything in 2024, whilst you might not get that, you do understand another type of invasive behavior because of your kind of cachet, if you will. So take that kind of lived experience and real-world experience and lean into that, and then when you don’t think you can lean into it anymore, lean into it further.”

Stan continued, explaining, “Yeah, we discussed the idea of being public property, right? Which was something my mind didn’t totally go to because obviously, my desire was always to want to, just, I felt the responsibility of wanting to kind of honor this part and honor what this character was dealing with as best as possible in a way that I could, in an authentic way and so on. And so, obviously, I was lucky that I had Adam to kind of bounce things off of but yeah, the public property thing was something you mentioned and it made a lot of sense. I mean, I think we’ve all kind of become a version of that, but when you sort of get recognized because of your work and stuff, there’s a sense of entitlement that comes with people. They just sort of feel that they can say whatever they want, it doesn’t matter if it’s true. They can just do whatever they want, whenever they want and you should just be okay and roll over and take it because you decided to do this. And yeah, I think, I guess I understood that.”

I spoke with the talented duo about how the film handles identity, what they learned about themselves from doing the project, the important passing of the torch from non-disabled actors playing characters with disabilities to actors with disabilities portraying who they want to play, and more.

Watch my interview below: