Aaron Schimberg’s third feature, A Different Man, is a genre-bending character portrait of Edward (Sebastian Stan, wearing a prosthetic mask), a lonely and failed actor disfigured by neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition referred to as “NF1.” Unable to assert himself romantically with his boorish playwright neighbor Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), Edward undergoes a Cronenbergian reconstructive procedure that does away with his former face. Years later, having assumed the name Guy (now Stan without the mask), he becomes obsessed with Oswald (Adam Pearson), a charismatic bon-vivant with NF1 set to play Edward in a production written by Ingrid and based on Guy’s former life.
Superficially, A Different Man follows in a lineage of films that feature impostering doubles, such as Persona (1966), Face/Off (1988), The Double (2011), and Enemy (2013), while inverting the tensional throughline of these films; namely, that the “imposter” impinging on the life of the protagonist is not doing so knowingly, nor is he malicious in intent. Fundamentally, A Different Man follows more closely in the traditions of The Face of Another and Seconds (both 1966) in its focus on the dramaturgy of social performance: the roles to which we believe we are cast, based on the masks we have been assigned.
For Schimberg, the subject of how others perceive us, and our response to their perceptions, is one that is deeply personal. He himself has a corrected bilateral cleft lip and palate, about which he remarks that “as far as facial disfigurements go, mine is the most common… As far back as I can remember, I’ve wondered: how do I present someone like myself positively, or at least realistically to my own experience?” On the occasion of A Different Man’s release, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Aaron and hearing about how he did just that.
Conor Truax: I was reading that you were surprised when Chained for Life (2018) came out that you received some criticism for casting Adam Pearson (who has NF1) in one of the lead roles for that film, and that in a Q&A you said that for your next film you’d cast one natural born actor and one in makeup and have them battle it out in the script. I’m curious whether that was part of the initial germ for this script, where you have Sebastian Stan and Adam doing just that?
Aaron Schimberg: That was absolutely one of the things that started this whole thing off. There were other things, too. I felt that Chained for Life was marginalized perhaps just for the subject matter alone. This is subject matter that is personal to me, and that I wanted to explore, so after Chained for Life I was thinking about how to break down this barrier; I think not only are people made uncomfortable by the subject matter, but people are also in some ways repelled by films about disfigurement because most films about disfigurement are the same. If they’re not horror films, they’re these sort of mawkish melodramas. Or, they’ll teach you some kind of lesson, or they’ll be preachy in some way. I really was just trying to express my own feelings, having a cleft palate. I’m always trying to be as direct as possible, but I can’t be direct because you have to fight through so many layers of prejudice, not just about disfigurement, but about films about disfigurement in general. I had to come up with various strategies to break through the preconceived notions about these kinds of films.
Conor: In terms of developing the strategies and writing the script, was it crafted around Adam, and did you work in isolation with Adam in mind, or were you collaborating with him alongside you?
Aaron: This is the only role I wrote for an actor besides the role I wrote for Mike Tyson in my very first film, and we couldn’t get him, which was very devastating for me. So I never wrote a role for anybody I knew again, until now. Part of this was based on working with Adam, on his personality, on the fact that I thought his performance in Chained for Life was underrated in some ways. His performance in that film was very nuanced, and I think a brilliant performance, but people just sort of assumed he was playing himself, and it’s the farthest thing from himself. I wanted to show off his range and write [A Different Man] as an homage to him, without discussing it with him.
After Chained for Life, I asked him, “would you want to work with me again? I’m writing a role for you. It’s sort of based on you, but I’m going to take it where I need to take it.” After I finished the script, I sent it to him and waited for two hours, to see what he was going to say. I was very nervous because I told him upfront, “Do you want to do this? It’s not going to happen if not, but it’s totally up to you.”
He wrote back two hours later and said, “You mean I have to learn to yodel and do karaoke?”
Conor: That’s amazing — he has a great singing voice. Something else that I found fascinating about the film is that Guy is both an impostor and he feels impostered, in a way. The only other film that I can think of with a similar tension is Face/Off. What drew you to this dynamic?
Aaron: What I really wanted to do is make a film about the way that people’s view disfigurement, and especially about how they view when a disfigured person is acting in a way they’re not used to. In the case of Oswald or Adam Pearson, they don’t seem to let their disfigurement define them, even if everybody else wants to burden them with that. I wanted the audience to empathize with a character that looked like them, but I didn’t want this character [Guy] to be a bigot or someone that they would distance themselves from. Really, I started with this idea that the way we judge other people is a reflection of the way we think about ourselves.
From there, I just literalized the idea. The way Edward/Guy is thinking about Oswald is really the way that people think about disfigurement, but he’s not judging him out of hatred. The reason he’s reacting the way he is to Oswald is because he’s thinking about himself: who he used to be; who he could have been; who he thinks he could have been; or who he thinks Oswald should be. He’s having all these feelings about Oswald, but we understand why. Beyond that, I don’t really think of Edward and Guy as different people. They’re the same person that’s been traumatized and doesn’t know how to deal with it. He’s locked into this way of thinking, and he’s not able to change it even after his appearance changes.
Conor: The last line of the film really consolidates the fact that there isn’t a distinction between Edward and Guy, and that despite undergoing this massive superficial transformation, he doesn’t really change at all.
A lot of the films and books that this movie brought to mind are not American. It’s interesting because, to your point about the prejudice and depiction of disfigurement, there’s a hesitancy to speak about appearance in film, at least in American film, with any sort of nuance or subtlety. More specifically, there seems to be a hesitancy to look beyond our obsession with self-image and look outward at our social dependence, for better or worse, on how other people objectively perceive and respond to us. Why do you think that is?
Aaron: Well, we have these beauty standards and the industry is founded on star power, and stars are beautiful and movies get funded by stars. For that reason, it’s very difficult to make a film which doesn’t have beautiful people. People have said to me, “this film speaks to our current obsession with beauty standards, Instagram filters, and Ozempic,” which I hadn’t even heard of when I was writing the script. I was never thinking about the story in universal terms. I was thinking about one man. I was thinking about Edward and how we develop our self-definition; or how much of our self-definition is influenced by the way others think of us, especially if other opinions are negative. If everybody despises you, how do you maintain your dignity in the face of that? How do you love yourself if nobody else loves you? Should you even love yourself? Could everybody else be wrong, and is it your duty to love yourself? I wanted to explore the mindset of somebody who does really inspire fear and revulsion in other people, and who doesn’t know how to love himself. That was the core of the story to me. He sees somebody who does seem to love himself, and that throws him into an identity crisis.
