Sebastian Stan will premiere his latest film, Fjord, at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s his first film where he’s playing a Romanian – Stan was born in Romania, and then he and his mother escaped the fascist regime there. Eventually, he became a naturalized American citizen, and he now lives and works in the US, UK and all around Europe. His partner, Annabelle Wallis, is British. They’re expecting their first child, and Stan is thinking a lot about his father, his stepfather, fatherhood in general and masculinity in general. Sebastian chatted with Deadline ahead of his Cannes premiere, and I was really moved by what he had to say about all of this and more:

What it means to be a “real man”: “I think the question of masculinity is really under a magnifying glass at the moment,” he says. “There are way smarter people than me that have been talking about this. Jonathan Haidt, for instance, who wrote that great book The Anxious Generation, has been talking not just about boys, but little girls also, and the lack of influences outside of the phone and the technology and what that’s doing. There’s also this other great book, I think it’s called Of Boys and Men [by Richard V. Reeves]. And you really see how young men right now are suffering from a lack of true male role models. We’re having a lot of examples at the moment of very narcissistic, very aggressive, very entitled examples of being a man… It’s incredibly upsetting. It’s painful to see.”

He also mentions the book Notes on Being a Man by Scott Galloway. “I want to be a good dad,” he says simply. “I’m feeling the responsibility of being a good father. And not to mention a good man. I’m 43 and I feel, in a lot of ways, I’m just starting to learn now. It’s just crazy to me. So, I love when I see I’m discovering different people’s point of view. I try to read as much as I can, no matter what the point of view is, just to understand it.”

What does “being a man” feel like? “It’s funny, in the last couple years, I’ve started to identify sometimes being a man with just holding a plank for a very long, long time… Because I think it is about tolerance. And I think that’s something that we’re not teaching young men. We’re not teaching them how to tolerate discomfort, how to understand their own emotions, their own anger, their own frustrations. Nobody’s educating them on how to embrace depression, or being sad, feeling things, being weak, crying. I reconnected with my own [biological] father much later in life, but I was able to draw this inspiration of, ‘It’s OK for you to feel whatever you’re feeling.’”

His stepfather was a real man: “[He had] this quiet integrity that you spoke about, this quiet strength, this way of providing, this way of being there. Listening and understanding and protection as well. You’ve got to provide and protect. That’s kind of what I thought about in terms of what it means to be a man. And sometimes that means putting your own ego aside and looking at how you can support your family, or your loved ones, and be an example.”

The welfare of children and young people. “Let me just state it for the record, how much I celebrated that verdict against the social media companies,” he says, referring to the recent landmark case in California against Meta and Google, citing them for negligent design and their effect on young people’s mental health. “Actually, finally holding them accountable for years and years, and stacks upon stacks of data [showing] that they have known of the neurological and emotional and mental impact that they’re having on these young people. That’s one of the reasons why you’ve got boys right now who are being totally subdued and seduced by these phones, and to some extent, I think brainwashed.”

His favorite show to watch with Annabelle: “Oh my god! What is the show that my girlfriend I watch all the time where you’re watching other people watch TV? Gogglebox! It’s hilarious. And it has a very weird, pleasing, soothing quality to it.”

[From Deadline]

I feel like Sebastian Stan and Prince Harry would get along really well, right? These are the exact issues Harry discusses too, including the Google/Meta lawsuit, and Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. When Harry was in Australia, I noted that Harry was the rare male public figure openly exhibiting a very healthy masculinity. I think Sebastian is like that as well – I like his conversation about teaching boys and men to sit in discomfort, to persevere, to simply be sad and feel those feelings, to be tolerant of things outside their control. I do think he’ll be a great dad.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.