Not a Cautionary Tale

Sophia Stewart reviews Aaron Schimberg’s film “A Different Man.”

By Sophia StewartJanuary 22, 2025

• Film

IF THERE WERE a magic pill, would you take it? Every disabled person I know has been asked this question, or else posed it to themselves. Once, I would have dismissed the hypothetical as a cruel thought experiment. Stuttering, which is genetic and has no cure, had made my life harder, much harder, but I was sure that it had made me a better person: more patient, more empathetic. Without it, who would I be? 

It’s early in Aaron Schimberg’s new film A Different Man when Edward (Sebastian Stan), a struggling actor with disfiguring facial tumors, is presented with his own magic pill. During a checkup, Edward’s doctor assesses the growth of his tumors, which are increasingly affecting his vision and hearing and require regular surgery. The doctor mentions that “an alternative path has presented itself”; as it happens, a colleague’s experimental drug trial is seeking participants with Edward’s condition. The doctor hedges—“words like ‘heal’ and ‘cure’ are anathema” to him, he says—but suggests that the treatment could fully eliminate the tumors: “The implications are life-changing for you.”

Beyond his health concerns, it’s not hard to imagine which aspects of his life—and his identity—Edward might want to change. He lives alone in a dingy one-bedroom with a brown leak in the ceiling; he has no friends, and his acting career is confined to playing “facially different” office workers in cringey corporate sensitivity-training videos. In train cars and waiting rooms, strangers stare at him, or conspicuously try not to. Meanwhile, his apartment building is a microcosm of microaggression. One neighbor offers the unsolicited advice to “be confident, brother”; another mutters “Jesus Christ” every time he passes Edward in the hall. The landlord asks him to feel a lump on his neck, worried it’s a tumor. Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), a chatty playwright who has just moved in next door, gasps when she first sees Edward; later, she befriends him out of some mix of guilt and pity. 

If Schimberg never denies the physical and material consequences of Edward’s condition, he leaves more ambiguous the extent to which it determines Edward’s circumstances. Indeed, parsing how much disability—or, for that matter, ability—preordains anyone’s life is tricky. Would Edward be more outgoing were it not for his appearance? Would I write so much were it not for my limited powers of speech? Nature, nurture, chicken, egg.

But in Schimberg’s film, the responses that the sight of Edward provokes—the starts, the stares—are unmistakable. As Namwali Serpell writes in her 2020 book Stranger Faces, the disfigured face “epitomizes an ambivalence about legibility central to our relationship to all faces.” Ironically, Edward’s chosen profession hinges on the legible face. If we rely on faces, and particularly those of actors, as texts—reading them for information, sentiment, potential threats—then Edward’s is written in a foreign language, one that, in Serpell’s words, demonstrates “resistance to our usual categories of understanding.” Indeed, all disability poses this epistemological challenge: what do we do with a face or body or mode of speech that confounds our expectations? 

For one, we look. The disfigured face, the disfluent voice—both turn the heads of passersby. Every ogle is an investigation. In Staring: How We Look (2009), disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes that staring is “an interrogative gesture that asks what’s going on and demands a story.” Chances are, we already have a certain story in mind—tragic, inspiring, cautionary—that overrides the particularity of the person in question. (To quote Joan Didion, that arch-critic of narrative: “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.”) Tidy frameworks shield us from discomfiting truths: the random allocation of adversity, the limited control we wield over our fates, the strong chance that disability will touch our lives. No, thank you. The aberrance must signify.

As we stare at Edward, and at the screen that contains him, we are likely moved by this impulse: his appearance must have some symbolism (an inner defect?), his plight must have some lesson (beauty isn’t everything?). Schimberg anticipates this response and rejects it impishly. But he also interrogates it. Edward’s occupation, after all, requires him to expose himself to prolonged looking. Yet he seems to find some power in holding and directing the gaze, converting himself from object to subject. At the same time, Edward grasps the impediment his illegible face poses to his career. During an audition, he performs a poignant monologue from Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) in which he says as much: “I think how much I, too, would like to be walking arm in arm with a woman, under the moon. I let myself be carried away, I forget myself—and then I suddenly see the shadow of my profile on the garden wall.”

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I recently participated in a study of people like me: not a drug trial like Edward’s, but an experiment all the same. I sat at a table in a small room and was visited by a series of four strangers—I later learned they were actors—who each asked me some inane questions and then watched as I choked and spat my way through a provided paragraph about rainbows. After each interaction, I filled out a questionnaire rating how I perceived my interlocutor: How “mature” did they seem? How “interesting”? How “cool”? Then, I rated how I thought they perceived me. In other words, could they see me through my disfluency? The way I speak is, at best, an unflattering filter; at worst, an insurmountable barrier. Each time I reached this portion of the survey, my eyes filled with tears; I knew exactly how I looked. I have no illusions—my aberrance signifies, and the burden of that signification sometimes feels unbearable.

For Edward, the semiotic baggage attached to his appearance is also intolerable. He opts to undergo the “life-changing” procedure—notably, after a botched romantic moment with Ingrid at his apartment. Within days, he begins to physically transform. In his bathroom mirror, he peels away his face in a metamorphosis that echoes Jeff Goldblum’s in David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), but in reverse, revealing a smooth, chiseled visage (Stan’s own, previously hidden under prosthetics). His molting complete, he stops by a bar, where strangers respond well to his beauty; one even blows him in the mirror-walled bathroom as he stares, rapt, at his own reflection. An unfettered future unfurls before him. The next morning, he decides the old Edward is dead and takes the name Guy in a nod to his newfound ordinariness.

Fast-forward some years: Edward (a.k.a. Guy) is living in a swanky loft and sleeping with a co-worker at the real estate firm where he is a star agent. (“Look at this guy! Look at this guy!” his colleague fawns over him.) One day, he sees Ingrid walking down the street and follows her to a little black box theater, where she is holding auditions for her new play, Edward, which is ripped from—and liberally embellishes upon—their neighborly encounters. The titular role was literally made for him; he auditions on the spot, lands the part, and soon starts sleeping with Ingrid.

Enter Oswald (Adam Pearson), a charming bon vivant with the same condition as pre-op Edward, who has been sent to the theater by a casting director specializing in “unique and unusual physiognomies.” Apart from his appearance, Oswald embodies all that the former Edward was not: he is gregarious, confident, stylish, well-rounded. He dates around and travels widely, practices jujitsu and does yoga, plays sax and excels at karaoke, and even has a photographic memory. (“What can’t you do?” Ingrid asks him.) People are drawn to his good nature; he outshines Edward in every room they share. Soon Oswald insinuates himself into Edward’s life to such an extent—taking his place in Edward and, in the process, winning Ingrid’s heart—that he threatens to usurp him entirely. Edward goes mad.

On its face, A Different Man appears to make a rather simplistic argument: that disability is a matter of attitude. Edward had blamed his looks for his stagnant life, but the film points to his outlook as the source of the problem. (At one point, Ingrid asks Edward if he would ever kill himself; “I don’t know, maybe,” he says.) Oswald, on the other hand, has refused to let his appearance define him, and thrives as a result. Thanks to his infectiously buoyant personality, people seem able to look past his face, whereas with Edward, it was all they saw: a partition between him and the world.

There is a grain of truth in this. Schimberg has described the real-life Adam Pearson, with whom he also collaborated on his 2018 movie Chained for Life, as “a very extroverted person—far more than I am.” This contrast set Schimberg thinking about how disfigurement—Schimberg was born with a cleft palate—had informed his own self-image. In the past, he had found himself “sometimes blaming [his] own social anxiety and shyness on” his cleft palate, but meeting Pearson, he says, “opened up possibilities for myself as well. Like, could I have been different? Could I have been a different kind of person?” 

Yet Schimberg has also stressed that the film is not a “moral tale.” As for what it has to say about disability, it is neither a call for self-love nor an argument for bootstrapping. Rather, A Different Man is an ode to the peculiarity of personality, and a warning against the dominance of identity over individuality—which is to say, against the shallow politics of “representation.”

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Ingrid’s play, Edward, exemplifies those politics in action. It takes dramatic queues from predecessors like The Elephant Man (1980) and Beauty and the Beast (1740), and in doing so replicates tropes that have long circumscribed depictions of disabled people. “I made him a victim,” Ingrid says of her titular protagonist. “I fell into the most obvious trap.” The real-life Edward is frustrated by her logic: “What is he supposed to be? A hero? An inspiration?” he asks. She replies, “He’s just … Edward.” 

Schimberg has purposefully rigged the movie to be a kind of trap, one that dramatizes the intractable bind of what Schimberg calls “proper representation.” On-screen, Ingrid wrestles with the ethics of casting Edward as her disfigured protagonist before ultimately replacing him with Oswald. Unbeknownst to Ingrid, Edward has literally walked in this character’s shoes despite no longer looking the part. Oswald, on the other hand, shares the character’s physical condition and little else. Both men bring what we’d call “lived experience” to the role. Is one casting choice more responsible—one form of representation more “authentic”—than the other?

Of course, there are few opportunities for actors with disfigurements, who are often stereotyped or demonized onstage and on-screen when they’re not actively excluded. At the same time, a preoccupation with propriety can limit the imagination. “The question is, do you cast someone with a condition even though it’s not the right fit?” Ingrid asks Edward. “Is it wrong to cast someone because of their disfigurement? Exploitative, even? Will people come to gawk? Where’s the ethical line?”

Schimberg has confronted these questions before. Chained for Life, which stars Pearson, takes place on a movie set whose cast includes a number of disabled and disfigured actors. Schimberg has said that he “always wanted to show people with disfigurements” on-screen, but the film received some blowback:

[S]ome people—not many, but some—when they saw Chained for Life said that the very presence of Adam in my film was exploitative. That I’m not allowed to use somebody with a disfigurement, which is counter to what we think of as representation. So it was really like there was no way to win.

With a A Different Man, he decided to “do both. I’ll put somebody playing somebody with a disfigurement and somebody with a disfigurement in a film together and I’ll have them battle it out.” That battle, in effect, reflects two competing approaches to representation; Stan and Pearson are both so good in their respective roles that you might forget which side you’re on.

The slyness of Schimberg’s script is also at play here. The film tempts viewers to make grand pronouncements about disability—to assign Oswald the role of good, well-adjusted disabled person, and make Edward his foil. Yet another trap. That pre-op Edward was so unlike Oswald isn’t a moral failing; they’re just two different people. “Normalcy” did not grant post-op Edward social grace, just as “aberrance” hasn’t dimmed Oswald’s glow. Whatever material improvements the new Edward has seen in his life, he is still the same Edward, stuck on the hedonic treadmill. Neither the experience of disability nor its alleviation has made him a better person—whatever that means. 

On another level, then, A Different Man is also about the unbearable, unbridgeable chasm between who we are and who we wish we could be. Though he surely prefers his new face, Edward envies Oswald; the more spectacular Oswald reveals himself to be, the wider the chasm yawns. I know this chasm well: I can’t count the number of parties I’ve spent staring achingly at a particularly loquacious guest. Indeed, it might be tempting to consider the dyad of Edward and Oswald in party game terms: would you rather be charismatic and disfigured or be a charmless stunner? But Schimberg rejects such binary thinking; he is more interested in the gradations between our ideal selves and our real selves.

On paper, after all, post-op Edward has everything: good looks, a swanky apartment, an active sex life, a cushy job, the admiration of his colleagues, and the freedom to move through the world unnoted. Yet despite these newfound blessings, Edward remains otherwise unchanged: dogged by a sense of passivity—perhaps a remnant of his old life, perhaps intrinsic to his being—which Oswald lacks. Having eliminated the biggest impediment to his acting career, he has also abandoned his desire to act; meanwhile, Oswald lives by his passions. The most significant difference between them, then, is simply that Edward does not know, maybe has never known, what he wants—or is too afraid to want at all.

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If I could speak with perfect fluency, I wonder, would I be not just a different person, but also the person I want to be? A few months ago, I joined a yoga studio in an attempt at self-improvement. When I arrived for the first class, the teacher asked for my name. My face contorted, eyes closed, mouth hardened into a gaping hole as I tried and failed to form the sibilant that starts my name. “Are you okay?” she asked. I coughed out the name, forced a reassuring smile, and grabbed a mat. When class began, the teacher asked us to close our eyes and envision the people we hoped to become. “What does that person do? How do they feel?” she asked. “What do they look like? Talk like?” Similar questions might have crossed Edward’s mind in the days leading up to his procedure. I certainly knew how my ideal self talked: effortlessly. No struggle, no strain.

Yes, I want fluency, but it’s not all I want. I want many things out of life—passion, adventure, a sense of accomplishment—and will doggedly pursue them whether or not I stutter. Adam Pearson, whose facial tumors are caused by a genetic condition, has attributed his resilience to the fact that he was “taught from a really early age to live the life you’ve got rather than mourn the one you don’t.” In A Different Man, Edward’s neighbor dispenses similar advice: “[A]ll unhappiness in life comes from not accepting what is.” (He attributes this quote to Lady Gaga.) This is the closest the film comes to approaching a moral. Schimberg doesn’t see Edward’s decision to undergo the procedure as a “moral choice”; he stresses that the film is “not a cautionary tale” about the perils of rejecting who you are. It’s far more practical on this point: By all means, try to change the thing that makes your life harder. Maybe you’ll manage it; maybe not. As my fluency has deteriorated in recent years, the magic pill proposition doesn’t offend me as it once did; sure, I’d take it. But there are things worth wanting beyond a magic pill. And should you actually get your hands on one, you had better know what you want next.