Hollywood actor Sebastian Stan, who played Bucky Barnes in the Marvel film franchise, and who’s clearly quite a leftist, was interviewed by Gentleman’s Quarterly, primarily regarding his latest film, The Apprentice, which Donald Trump’s hopefully still suing over, because it depicts him as a rapist without any solid evidence. But Stan’s also opportunistically attacked detractors of the Marvel movies, and he said, quite rudely:
…Marvel, the world’s highest-grossing movie franchise of all time, has faced quite a bit of criticism in recent years – in part for the way in which they’ve handled the transition to a new set of heroes and storylines since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. Stan doesn’t have any time for it. “I’ve never been part of a company that puts so much heart and thought into anything,” he says. “I think if Marvel was gone, it’d be such a big hole to try and fill up. Don’t just go out there and shit on something without offering something better.”
He’s certainly not done with the MCU yet. Thunderbolts, which he’ll headline alongside Florence Pugh, will arrive in May next year. And he’s already looking beyond that, to a potential reunion with Robert Downey Jr, who has been announced to return in the next Avengers movie – not as Iron Man, but as the villain Doctor Doom. “I hope I’m in a scene with him,” Stan says. “Is there any other guy that could pull that off? I don’t know, probably not. After Tropic Thunder, is there anything that guy can’t do?” he says, laughing. It is perhaps the movie that I least expect Stan – or anyone, to be honest – to reference in 2024, but I should know better. Downey Jr is a transformation master, too. Game recognises game.
Trump doesn’t exist in the Marvel universe – or at least not yet – but if you spot a hint of him in Thunderbolts, you’ll know why. “I went off to Marvel after [The Apprentice],” Stan says. “And we were doing scenes, and I would do something, a thing or two, and be like, ‘Fuck! This is still living somewhere.’”
I won’t be shocked if the upcoming Thunderbolts film does have some kind of attack, subtle, metaphorically or otherwise, on Trump, which’ll only compound an already horribly woke direction the franchise has been going in for at least a few years now. If Martin Scorsese’s recent film, Killers of the Flower Moon, was PC, it is valid to say you have to offer something better if they aren’t. But it’s wrong to be so vulgar and foul-mouthed about it as Stan’s doing. Does he really think he’s improving a dire situation in Hollywood when they’re imploding artistically? Sorry, but no. The point to be made is that neither major nor minor studios in Hollywood are delivering much that’s tour de force these days, due to all the wokeness both are capable of turning out.
Eventually, it will bring down Hollywood, and comicdom. Too bad most of the actors playing the superheroes and their co-stars don’t have what it takes to admit what’s going wrong.
Originally published here.
English (US) · 