Sebastian Stan has a few words for those who "shit on" Marvel Studios

Sebastian Stan is having a moment right now. He’s currently promoting the bad boy film of awards (and election) season, The Apprentice, a movie that has only become more interesting because Hollywood studios were too scared to get behind it. He’s also starring in A24’s A Different Man, one of the year’s best-reviewed movies (The A.V. Club gave it an A). But no matter how much indie cred he gets—and this year, he’s getting a lot—Stan will never turn his back on the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  

“I’ve never been part of a company that puts so much heart and thought into anything,” he says in a new interview with GQ. “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.”

Stan previously admitted to feeling “protective” of Marvel Studios, even proposing that the superhero ecosystem is what helps allow smaller movies to get made. After more than a decade playing The Winter Soldier, a.k.a. Bucky Barnes, Stan is happy to continue playing in the MCU sandbox. He even expresses hope to be “in a scene with” Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom in the next big Avengers saga. “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?”

All this to say, for Sebastian Stan, his MCU work and indie work can exist side-by-side. Sometimes a little too closely side-by-side, actually, to the point where Donald Trump started blurring with Bucky Barnes on Thunderbolts*. “I went off to Marvel after [The Apprentice],” he tells GQ, “And we were doing scenes, and I would do something, a thing or two, and be like, ‘Fuck! This is still living somewhere.'”