A ‘Fresh’ turn for Sebastian Stan in a dark romance
Director Mimi Cave was driving one day when she got an email from a name she didn’t recognize. It was Sebastian Stan, writing under a pseudonym.
“I just couldn’t help myself,” Stan wrote.
She’d been considering him to star opposite Daisy Edgar-Jones in her feature debut “Fresh,” which is loosely about the horrors of modern dating. Attached was a video, a kind of supplementary audition, of him dancing around a kitchen with a steak knife.
It wasn’t unrelated to the part. His character, Steve, has a pivotal dance moment in a kitchen set to Animotion’s “Obsession.” And Cave had a background in dance and directing music videos for cool indie outfits like Lucius, Sleigh Bells and tUnE-yArDs.
What Stan didn’t know at the time was that the part was already his.
“I had to pull my car over,” Cave said, laughing. “We’d already decided we were going to cast him but this just put the nail in the coffin. He was obviously super into it and excited and inspired.”
It may only be March, but Stan is already having a big year with his transformational, tattooed turn as Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee in “Pam & Tommy” and as a possibly too-good-tobe-true boyfriend in “Fresh,” both of which are available on Hulu.
“Fresh,” in particular, had Stan doing deep dives on relationships, reading Alain de Botton’s treatise on marrying the wrong person, and other complex men in recent history that should probably go unnamed — it’s one of those theless-you-know-going-in-the-better movies.
“It has that fun kind of spontaneous, naturalistic banter that you would see in ‘Before Sunrise.’ Two people meeting and kind of calling each other out and sort of being honest and aware how awkward meeting someone is without even knowing them,” he said. “You want to know what happens to these two people. Then it takes a turn and becomes even more fascinating.”