Sebastian Stan’s one of the key ingredients of the Captain America trilogy. In the all-important part of Steve Rogers’ best bud, Sergeant James ‘Bucky’ Buchanan Barnes, he’s had major roles in all three movies. That’s 2011’s The First Avenger, 2014’s The Winter Soldier and 2016’s Civil War, to jog your memory. But which one does Stan consider to be his favorite?
The actor revealed the answer to this while holding a Q&A panel at Seattle’s ACE Comic-Con this weekend. Which one he picked isn’t too surprising, either, as it was The Winter Soldier, which featured Bucky’s shock return from the dead as the eponymous brainwashed HYDRA assassin. It seems that his fondness for the movie stems from the fact that it allowed him to give a very different performance, with Stan explaining:
“Winter Soldier was cryptic and kind of like strange. The whole process of that was a lot of fun for me. I’m saying this and they’ll be like ‘Great, perfect, let’s never write a line for him again,’ but I didn’t have a lot of lines in that movie, I was trying to tell a story physically and it was interesting, it was interesting in a different way.”
This makes a lot of sense. For much of the runtime of the movie, he plays the Winter Soldier either in the shadows or while wearing a mask. Like the actor says, much of the work had to come from his eyes and his body language. It was an impressive portrayal though and helped the character go down as one of the best MCU antagonists.
That said, Bucky did have one important line from the movie that sticks in our minds. When Steve realizes the truth about his enemy and says his name aloud, the Winter Soldier doesn’t understand, saying “Who the hell is Bucky?” It’s a neat line as it quickly establishes that he’s lost his memories. For Stan, though, it proved to be a problem. “I was haunted by the line for a long time,” he commented at the event, explaining that he struggled to find the right way of delivering it.
Sebastian Stan was last seen as Bucky in Avengers: Infinity War, where he seemed to meet his end. If he gets resurrected, though, fans suspect he might become Captain America himself in Phase 4 of the MCU. Stay tuned for more on that front.
