Sebastian Stan has spent the past few years making career choices that make it hard to pin him down. He played Donald Trump in The Apprentice, disappeared under prosthetics in A24’s A Different Man, returned to Marvel as Bucky Barnes in Thunderbolts* and is now heading to Gotham as Harvey Dent in the upcoming The Batman: Part II. Finally, he’s breaking his silence on joining Matt Reeves second entry in the standalone The Batman franchise, and his comments have me so excited.
In a new interview with Deadline, Stan discussed his upcoming DC movie role, his 2026 movie release, Fjord, fatherhood, masculinity and the immigrant experience. He will soon begin work on The Batman: Part II in London, where he is set to play Harvey Dent, the Gotham district attorney who becomes the villain Two-Face. Asked about joining Matt Reeves’ Batman universe, Stan said:
[It’s] a challenge, like everything else. I feel like it’s a really ambitious movie and I think if we do it all right — and obviously I’m so excited about Matt Reeves [directing] because he’s been one of my favorites for a long, long time — I really think it’s going to blow people away. It’s going to surprise a lot of people, I think, too.
That is not a plot reveal, of course. The Captain America: First Avenger star is not spilling Arkham files across the table. But for fans waiting to see where Reeves takes Robert Pattinson’s Caped Crusader next, the word “surprise” is the little green light flickering at the end of a dark hallway.
Reeves’ The Batman was less interested in the new superhero movie spectacle than in mood and in delving into the character's detective angle, which so many adaptations have completely left behind.
Reeves' Gotham felt wet, sick and infected by old money. Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne was still a young vigilante, less polished icon than wounded insomniac in a cape. Dropping Harvey Dent into that world makes a lot of sense, especially if Reeves wants to keep digging into Gotham’s broken institutions.
Dent has always worked best when he is more than a villain. In most iterations of the character, he begins as a public servant, a prosecutor, and a symbol of reform. One of my favorite versions of the character is the groundbreaking Batman: The Animated Series from the early '90s, and in that series, Harvey Dent and Bruce Wayne were great friends before Dent’s fall and turn to crime, which makes the fall more devastating. If Stan is playing the character before the full transformation into Two-Face, there is room for something more tragic than the standard comic-book-movie fare.
That is where Stan feels like such an interesting fit. He has made a career out of characters whose faces don’t tell the whole story. Bucky Barnes is a soldier-turned-weapon who spends years trying to crawl back toward himself. His Oscar-nominated turn in The Apprentice asked him to inhabit a public figure without turning the performance into a simple impersonation. A Different Man and Fjord both point to an actor who seems increasingly interested in discomfort, contradiction and roles that do not flatter him, and that has me so excited to see what he brings to the world of Gotham City.
The bigger question is how much of Two-Face we will actually see in The Batman: Part II. Reeves may be setting up Dent’s downfall rather than rushing straight to it, which could be the smarter move. The first film took its time with Gotham’s sickness. Letting Harvey stand inside that system before it devours him could make the eventual turn nastier.
We still have time to wait and speculate about Dent’s future as The Batman Part II doesn’t hit theaters until October 1, 2027. Fans can return to Reeve’s first take on The Dark Knight by revisiting The Batman with an HBO Max subscription.
