We’re sitting in a restaurant, having lunch between his multiple studio visits for various publications. It’s busy and bustling around us, the way TIFF tends to transform every hotel and restaurant over its 11-day period. Stan settles in at the table and digs into a chicken salad.
He’s here to talk with Variety about the movie he says he’s been chasing, in one form or another, since he was a teenager. Directed by Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu — a filmmaker Stan says he had tracked for years — it is Mungiu’s first English-language feature and Stan’s first Romanian-language role, a project the two circled for a long time before the right script surfaced. Stan plays Mihai, a fundamentalist father whose children are seized by the state, in a story inspired by a real family and shot in Mungiu’s signature register of long, unbroken takes and a pointed refusal of the close-up.
Coming off an Oscar nomination for the drama “The Apprentice” in 2024, the same year he won a Golden Globe for lead actor (comedy) for another movie, “A Different Man,” Stan sees clearly what he’s after and why. He has entered his 40s and it has changed him. He met “The Batman” filmmaker Matt Reeves, who he said had seen and loved “The Apprentice” and around the same time cold-called DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn to let him know he was available and, in his words, “ready to rock” when the opportunity presented itself.
Of course, he won’t confirm his role and the light visibly goes out of his face when the name Harvey Dent, whom he is rumored to be playing, comes up. But he does not undersell what Reeves is building. Whether audiences take him up on it is another question entirely.
The movie’s big theme is the immigrant experience, and that was my way in. When I read the script, I remembered coming to the U.S. and the shame I felt — the self-awareness of just being different. My mom always told me, not too dissimilar from this family in the movie, you don’t want to make allies, you don’t want to make enemies, you want to be nice to everybody.
As I got older and got more confident about embracing my differences, around 16, 17, I told myself I had to go back and find a movie to do in Romania one day, to reconnect. Cristian was one of the filmmakers I’d been tracking. I knew how he shot, how morally ambiguous he liked to make his films.
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