00:00 Sebastian Stan is calling out a journalist who described his latest film character, who has a facial disfigurement, as a beast.
00:07 Stan was on deck at the Berlin Film Festival to do press for his latest film, A Different Man, which stars himself and actor Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis.
00:17 The film follows Edward, played by Stan, an aspiring actor with facial disfigurement, who after undergoing reconstructive surgery, starts a new life,
00:25 only to become obsessed with an actor with a facial disfigurement, played by Pearson, who is playing him in a play based on his former life.
00:32 During the press conference for the film in Berlin, the journalist, who was not a native English speaker, asked Stan,
00:38 "What do you think happens after the transformation from this so-called beast, as they call him, to this perfect man?"
00:44 "I have to call you out a little bit on the choice of words there, because I think part of why the film is important is because we often don't have maybe even the right vocabulary."
00:57 Stan continued, "It's a little more complex than that, and obviously there is language barriers and so on, but 'beast' isn't the word."
01:04 When asked about the importance of on-screen representation of characters with disfigurements,
01:09 Pearson spoke about his two months of filming A Different Man on location in Manhattan, saying,
01:14 "I found my coffee spot, I found my breakfast spot, and I found my bar.
01:18 Initially, you have got to do a lot of heavy lifting and the legwork in the conversation, but the more you do it, the easier it gets."
01:24 The actor, who also starred in director Aaron Schoenberg's Chain for Life, added,
01:28 "The only way to challenge people's perception on something, truly challenge it, is to gently and kindly expose them to it."
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