Stan finds gold with his role in ‘I, Tonya’
The story of figure skater Tonya Harding is so outrageous that the actress who portrays her, Margot Robbie, can be forgiven for not realizing it was a true tale when she first read the script. Harding, her thenhusband, Jeff Gillooly, and her bodyguard Shawn Eckhart were implicated in an attack on fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan before the 1994 Olympics, and the media coverage was relentless.
In telling her story, screenwriter Steven Rogers spent time with both Harding and Gillooly and uses their different versions of the events to tell a funny, insightful and very human story. Best known for his work in such blockbusters as “The Martian” and as Bucky “The Winter Soldier” Barnes in the “Captain America” films, Sebastian Stan completely transformed himself to play Gillooly, a man who sported a mustache he “can’t apologize enough for.”
Stan: “Not a lot of things like this come my way. It had this documentary style and so many funny elements but also these very scary, violent sequences. I’ve never played anyone that was a real person before, so that excited me. I immediately went online and looked him up and found an episode of ‘Inside Edition’ with him, and it was such an interesting character study. He was fascinating. I was bouncing ideas around with (director Craig Gillespie) and getting excited, and then I had a moment where I realized this is a true story and these are real people, and their lives were ruined by this. I’ve learned through the years to keep a rein on judging characters. It’s very easy to do that.
“The day I got the part, Craig said, ‘If you want to meet Jeff, you can. But you don’t have to.’ But I wanted to get some perspective. Tonya’s upbringing was out in the open. It was known she had a violent past and she was somewhat replaying her past. But with Jeff, I couldn’t really find anything on his upbringing. In addition, I was going to have to play him when he was 50 years old. I didn’t even have a picture of what he looks like.
“Two weeks before shooting, I met with him. It was bizarre sitting across from the person you’ve been looking at and listening to. I had the tapes from his meeting with Steven and had been listening to him over and over again. It was surreal at first. We met at a restaurant and had dinner. He seemed apprehensive. He hadn’t read the script, and I think he was hesitant about revisiting it. At the same time, he was open and direct in talking about the experience and himself.
“I asked a lot of questions: ‘How did you meet? How did you fall in love? Why the mustache?’ He really didn’t have an answer for that one; I don’t think he gave it a lot of thought.”