Sebastian Stan is no stranger to superhero movies after spending more than a decade playing Bucky Barnes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, his decision to cross the aisle for Matt Reeves’ The Batman Part II was never simply about adding a DC role to his resume. Instead, the opportunity emerged from one of the most unexpected and transformative projects of Stan’s career. Stan joined director Cristian Mungiu at the Toronto International Film Festival this week to promote their new drama, Fjord, which follows a Romanian family living in Norway whose children are taken away by social services.
During an interview with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff at TIFF, Stan was asked what Reeves’ sequel could still offer him after his extensive history within the superhero genre. Although the actor carefully avoided revealing anything about his mysterious character, he did explain which previous performance caught Reeves’ attention. Stan revealed that his Oscar-nominated performance as Donald Trump in Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice directly sparked his conversations with Reeves. The actor never imagined the controversial biographical drama would eventually take him to Gotham City, but Reeves was already familiar with the filmmakers behind Stan’s more independent work. He explained:
“Well, you know what’s interesting is all these directors, they watch each other, believe it or not, even if they’re doing different sizes and stuff. Matt Reeves, he knows Cristian, and he knew Ali Abbasi. He was a big fan of The Apprentice, and that’s how that conversation started. I mean, not in a million years did I think that doing that movie was going to lead to me having a conversation with that director.”
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Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
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Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
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🪙No Country for Old Men
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01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
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02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
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03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
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04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
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05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
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06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
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07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
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08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
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09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
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10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
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The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
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Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
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Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
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Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
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Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
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No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
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‘The Apprentice’ Led Sebastian Stan to ‘The Batman Part II’
Robert Pattinson in The Batman Part IIImage via Matt Reeves
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For Stan, blockbuster filmmaking and smaller character-driven projects are not opposing career paths, but parts of the same theatrical ecosystem. He argued that both types of movies ultimately depend on one another, particularly as the industry continues trying to convince audiences to return to theaters. While he could not offer any story details, Stan did assure fans that Reeves has approached the long-awaited The Batmansequel with considerable care:
“These worlds consistently collide, and I think the thing about these movies is those movies need these movies. And these movies, to some extent, need those. It’s an ecosystem that they all have to thrive in. It’s all for the better of getting people to the theater, which we have to do everything for. But again, if all I can say about the movie is that it’s just to say there’s real thought behind that movie, and Matt certainly has thought about it for three, four years.”
The Batman Part II is currently scheduled to arrive in theaters on February 18, 2028. Stay tuned at Collider for the rest of Nemiroff’s conversation with Stan and Mungiu.
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