Sebastian Stan’s Funniest Role Is a 15-Minute Short

You Know Him as Bucky. Did You Know He Played a Magician Named Terry the Terrific?

Sebastian Stan has spent the last few years building one of the most deliberately uncommercial filmographies in Hollywood — a disfigured man in A Different Man, a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice, whatever he’s doing next in Gotham.

He also once played a magician named Terry the Terrific whose mother started sleeping with his childhood friend.

What is The Magic of Passion?

A 2022 short film directed by Miles Gillespie, released December 3, 2022.

Stan plays Terry, a magician who comes home to reconnect with his mother (K Callan) — and discovers she has begun a relationship with his childhood friend, played by Paul Walter Hauser.

That’s the whole engine: a grown man in stage makeup trying to process, in real time, that his best friend is dating his mother.

Why it’s worth fifteen minutes

Two reasons.

The first is Stan playing comedy, which his fandom sees far too little of. He is very good at being the straight man to a catastrophe — the performance runs on rising, barely-contained horror while everyone around him behaves as though nothing unusual is happening.

The second is the pairing. Stan and Hauser met on Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya in 2017, and the ease between them here is the same thing Hauser described when he talked about Stan recently: “I love him to death.” Read what Hauser said about Stan → Paul Walter Hauser on Sebastian Stan: “The World Is Appreciative of Him the Way I Am”

Watching two friends play characters who absolutely should not be in a room together is its own small pleasure.

Where to watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lhyEvmX5w8— official link

The short version

If you only know Stan from the Marvel films, this is a fifteen-minute argument that he’s funnier than he gets to be in most of his work. It’s free, it’s short, and almost nobody’s talking about it.

The Magic of Passion (2022), directed by Miles Gillespie, stars Sebastian Stan, Paul Walter Hauser, and K Callan.

Sources: IMDb · Letterboxd