Accepting his 2025 Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy, A Different Man star Sebastian Stan reminded those in the Beverly Hilton ballroom about the importance of representation and including people with disabilities in our conversations about fighting back against social prejudices.

“Our ignorance and discomfort around disability and disfigurement has to end now,” said Stan, who starred in director Aaron Schimberg’s film as an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes tumors to grow on one’s skin and bones. “We have to normalize it and continue to expose ourselves [and our children] to it. Encourage acceptance. One way we can do that is by continuing to champion stories that are inclusive.”

He elaborated on this when he spoke backstage in the Golden Globes press room, frequently mentioning Schimberg as well as his co-star who does have the disorder, Adam Pearson.

“This particular writer and director really deserves to be working and be telling these stories. I think what this [award] signifies and it’s a great acknowledgement that I’m very grateful for,” Stan said.

He added that “Adam Pearson’s mom, at the end of the movie, after she saw it, said to me, ‘I’ve always wanted somebody to walk in his shoes; to understand what it is. And this is probably as close as I could get.”

“We have to somehow keep adding to this narrative and expand and expose further so that we do have a more normalized reaction,” to people with disabilities, he said. “When I was walking on the streets, it was just so extreme. People just feel you’re public property, that they can point at you. They can do whatever they want. They just own you for looking different; for being different … this film, that actually allows you the viewer to look at Adam Pearson with this condition and take him differently than the stereotypical preconceived narrative that we’ve been handed down that every disabled person who’s just a tortured person who’s alone.”

In A Different Man, Stan’s Edward undergoes a procedure that will eliminate his tumors. It’s only afterward, when he becomes a slick realtor, that he realizes his crush — Renate Reinsve’s Ingrid — has turned his story into a play and that she’s fallen for Pearson’s character, who is playing a version of Edward on stage.

“A lot for me came alive under [designer] Mike Moreno’s prosthetics,” he says. “It was a huge piece for me because it allowed me to go in the world as Edward. And that informed everything, It informed the isolation and the powerlessness and the self-consciousness and the invasion of privacy that I experienced 20 times more walking around as Edward than I ever would as myself.”

Moreno’s work was also honored through another performer that night. He also designed the prosthetics for The Penguin actor Colin Farrell, who took home the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series, Anthology Series of Motion Picture Made for Television.