Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with A Different Man, A24’s dark comedy from writer and director Aaron Schimberg. The film, which won Best Picture at the Gotham Awards earlier this month, stars Sebastian Stan as Edward, an aspiring actor who undergoes a radical new experimental medical procedure to transform his appearance drastically.
The procedure is a success, and Edward changes his persona and name to Guy, a photogenic rising star who seems to have it made in the shade.
Edwards’s former neighbor, Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), finds inspiration in his life to create an Off Broadway play. Edward auditions for the role of a lifetime, a role he believes he is the only person on earth who could possibly understand. Edward is then eclipsed by Oswald (Adam Pearson), a character who propels the story into more complex and layered territory — a slyly captivating hall of mirrors, one reflecting upon another. Oswald, another actor with the same condition, yet one so strikingly confident, talented and authentically himself, quickly and unequivocally steals Edward’s thunder.
When Oswald takes over the role of Edward, becoming a beloved star in the process, he leaves Guy in a brooding crisis that spins out of control. Consumed by a desire to reclaim his identity, Edward is drawn to a dangerous obsession. He oscillates between his true self and a simulated mask of his former face, oscillating between identities, unable to live with himself … with either of his selves.
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Schimberg’s own experience with a corrected bilateral cleft lip and palate profoundly shaped his perspective and inspired the script. “As facial disfigurements go, mine is one of the most common, yet I’ve only seen depictions of people like me that are negative or insulting. 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?”
Schimberg’s film puts a fresh spin on the age-old question of identity, joining a cinematic tradition that includes the haunting masks of Teshigahara’s The Face of Another, the shocking transplants of Frankenheimer’s Seconds, the face-swaps of John Woo’s Face/Off, and the twisted experiments of Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In.
A Different Man had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and then hit Berlin, where Stan, who also stars in this year’s Donald Trump pic The Apprentice, won Best Actor (he is also nominated for a Golden Globe). The movie hit theaters in September. In addition to the Gothams win, Schimberg’s script has been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award.
Read that script below.
