Sebastian Stan reveals how close he came to playing Captain Kirk in Star Trek reboot

Sebastian Stan may currently be on the big screen playing a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice, but the MCU star remembers a time when he didn’t have any acting jobs.

Stan, who broke out in 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, told Happy Sad Confused host Josh Horowitz that he had a few near-misses before he landed the role of Stever Rogers' best friend Bucky Barnes.

"There were a couple of things I didn’t get that I really desperately wanted," said Stan, 42. "I think Captain Kirk for J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, that was one of the first things I got very close to," he recalled.

Moments before, Horowitz had half-jokingly suggested Star Trek's Captain Kirk as one of the roles Stan might’ve been up for and was pleased that the Pam & Tommy star confirmed his casting savvy. "Is that true? I just threw that out," Horowitz said. "I didn’t know that, but I could see that. I could see you being up for that."

Stan said that he got quite far into the casting process for the 2009 reboot of the beloved sci-fi franchise, including a screen test with Abrams at Paramount Studios.

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"I remember my manager had me do, like, a separate photoshoot where I would try and replicate all of these William Shatner pictures just to send to (Abrams) to see how much I looked like him," Stan said before concluding, "Anyway. Didn’t get it."

The part eventually went to Chris Pine, who starred alongside Zachary Quinto and Zoe Saldaña in three Star Trek films and a video game.

But that's not the only high-profile role Stan lost out on. He was also in the running to play Hal Jordan in the 2011 DC Comics flop Green Lantern. "It was me and, like, Justin Timberlake, Jared Leto, Ryan Reynolds," Stan said. "I remember looking at these guys and going 'I’m f---ed. There’s no way this is happening for me at all.'"

Then again, the Marvel star told Horowitz that he's grateful his career unfolded the way it did.

"You’d come close and it wouldn’t happen, and in a way, looking back, I’m almost glad it didn’t because I don’t know if I could’ve handled that level of attention like some of those guys," he said.

Stan is plenty booked today, with The Apprentice as his latest role to make headlines. The film has courted controversy both for attempting to humanize the former president and for its warts-and-all presentation of Trump as a vain man who pops diet pills and sexually assaults his wife Ivana.

"I submitted an annotated draft of the script to our lawyers that was point-by-point articulating where the information came from, and how I dramatized the scenes," screenwriter Gabriel Sherman told EW. "So it was rigorously supported by the research, and everyone on the filmmaking team was comfortable with that before we went into production."

Trump himself has called the film a "cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job," which prompted The Apprentice director Ali Abbasi to suggest that he and Trump connect via phone to discuss things further.

Stan transformed into a version of Trump from the ‘70s and ‘80s using a “less is more” approach to his prosthetics and makeup and caused natural bloating in his face by ingesting soy sauce and other high-sodium food.

Not for nothing, but Stan isn’t the only high-profile actor in Hollywood today who didn’t get final permission to board the USS Enterprise; in 2023, Justified star Timothy Olyphant discussed losing out on the role of Dr. Leonard McCoy to Karl Urban, who curently stars in the Prime Video hit The Boys.