Sebastian Stan told a Tuesday press conference at the Cannes Film Festival that he’s “still purging” from the role that last brought him to the festival: playing Donald Trump in The Apprentice. 

When he brought that film to Cannes, it was just months before the 2024 election. Now he’s back, getting rave reviews for playing a Romanian Christian conservative in Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, and Trump has been president again for over a year. Asked by The Hollywood Reporter how his understanding of the president has changed in the intervening time, Stan looked down and shook his head, as the press room exploded in laughter — assuming he was reacting to being asked a question that he didn’t want to answer. 

Instead, Stan looked up with a fierce expression, and the room fell silent. “It’s just not a laughing matter, to be honest. It isn’t,” he said. “I think we’re in a really, really bad place. I really do. When you’re looking at what’s happening, which is the consolidation of the media, censorship, the threats, the supposed lawsuits that seemingly never end, but don’t actually go anywhere, you know, the writing was on the wall.”

The creative team had experienced this with The Apprentice, he said, “to the point where we were three days before the festival, unsure if the movie was going to play at the festival — and maybe more people are paying attention to the film, and I think we’ll stand the test of time for that — but we went through all of it way before Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. I wish it wasn’t like that.”

In Fjord, the Marvel star has a very different hairline than in his last Cannes outing, but the new movie is no less a lightning rod. With a severely shaved head and sizable bald spot, Stan plays Mihai, a conservative Christian father of five who runs afoul of Norway’s progressive, and draconian, child protective services, sparking debates around freedom of speech and freedom of religion that have been echoing up and down the Croisette. The film, with Renate Reinsve as the family’s matriarch, Lisbet, raises questions of who’s more guilty of imposing their values on others: the conservative family that’s praying in school or the progressive system that’s taking their children away.

It received a nine-and-a-half-minute standing ovation at its Monday night premiere and is the current front-runner to win the Palme d’Or.  

Mungiu based the film on years of news reports, particularly ones he’d read about Norway, in which children of immigrants raised in traditionalist families were taken from their parents. Then he went to Norway and spoke to police, judges, NGOs, journalists. “What I really wish to do, like always, is speak about something that I consider to be one of the most important issues in our contemporary global society, which is this conflict of values, and especially between these kind of traditional values and these progressive values,” Mungiu said. “And we see that this led to the splitting of the society into groups of people that really detest each other. We say that nowadays we live in a global world, but we couldn’t be more divided.” 

The film was not just about Romania and Norway, but about the U.S. and France. “We live in a very, very divided society in which people have completely stopped trying to understand the others who do not share the same views with them,” he said. “I understand progress, but I think that even a progressive society is good to doubt every now and then about the values that you wish to impose on others. If they are this good, you need to convince them not to impose them.”

During the press conference, Stan described how the film had been a personal quest for him. He was born in Romania before moving to Vienna with his single mother, a pianist, and finally settling in Rockland County, New York, where he first learned English. “Personally, certainly, it’s been a journey for me to reconnect with Romania,” he said. “I left in a very chaotic way and I’ve really tried to educate myself about the country, and I found through film I can learn more easily.” 

He’d been a fan of Mungiu’s for years, ever since taking his mother to see 2016’s Graduation at the New York Film Festival, and welcomed the chance to speak some Romanian onscreen and rehearse in Romania. He and Reinsve visited Pentecostal churches for research, but he said a lot of his performance was based on his upbringing. “Even though my time really was split between America, Vienna, and Romania, I still grew up with pretty traditional Romanian upbringings, and so I kind of understood a lot of what was going on in the script,” he said. 

How we raise our children and what we pass on to them about how we were raised has been on the actor’s mind a lot. He and girlfriend Annabelle Wallis revealed that they are expecting just one night before the premiere, when they went to the Kering Women in Motion dinner and revealed she’s pregnant. 

“I’ve been reflecting about having children and trying to understand what it means to be a parent in today’s world, and so that fueled a lot of things,” said Stan. 

When asked by a Spanish journalist if he’s experienced being ostracized for his accent or language skills, Stan replied, “I think you’re talking about discrimination, right, on all levels, which is sort of happening around all of us.”

“I mean, how are we all dealing with it?” he went on. “I think the only way to do it is just to remain as honest as possible, and to think about your own morals and your own values, and to be the example that you, that you want to see in the world.” 

As an actor, he said, he struggled to understand his role in stopping discrimination. “I’m an actor — whatever — but I’m not on the front lines, I’m not in an operating room, I’m not being shot at,” he said. “But this is my medium, this is my lane, and all I can do is try to involve myself in movies that bring up conversations and different points of view.” He was reminded of a quote he heard about art once, that it doesn’t have to solve problems, but just embody them correctly. “And I think as long as we can continue to do that fearlessly, then I think we can actually push back against those things.”