In A Different Man, MCU star Sebastian Stan plays Edward, an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition in which tumors grow in the nervous system. Edward is jumpy and nervous, constantly on high alert in public. He lives alone in a leaky, rundown New York apartment with only new neighbor Ingrid (The Worst Person in the World's Renate Reinsve), a playwright, for company. When he's offered to take part in an experimental drug trial, then, he takes his doctor up on the opportunity. What the treatment gives him is a whole new face without tumors, and Edward uses his new look as a chance to start a new life. He realizes it's not so easy to leave your past behind, though, when he discovers Ingrid has written a play about his life – and cast someone else to play him.
The actor in question, Oswald (played by Under the Skin's Adam Pearson), is everything Edward never was: charismatic, charming, and at ease in the world. He can seemingly do everything, from yodeling to playing the saxophone, and Edward becomes increasingly obsessed with him, to disastrous effect. "The idea of somebody just investing all of these hopes and dreams into this cure, only to come out the other side and feel more empty than he was before, I think that's a very real thing," Stan tells GamesRadar+ when we sit down with him and Pearson in London. "That's what I think people will relate to. We're all there, I think, at the threshold of figuring out, who are we? What's different about me? What's my identity, or what am I being told constantly by other people on how I should be?"
