The MCU's Biggest Star You Totally Forgot Was on Law & Order
Sebastian Stan has played a number of notable roles in various movies and TV series.
He was a wealthy outcast in Gossip Girl, Tonya Harding's abusive ex in I, Tonya, and a rocker with talking genitalia in Pam & Tommy. However, there is no doubt that he owes most of his worldwide fame to playing Bucky Barnes, better known as the Winter Soldier, throughout several MCU installments.
However, not many of those who watched his superheroic exploits and character drama are aware about Sebastian's humble beginnings as an actor, long before he got any role that might have caused people to check his name during the credit roll.
Then again, his debut was relatively common. As with great many New York-based actors, his career truly began when he made an episodic appearance on Law & Order.
After all, Law & Order, like any immensely long police procedural is constantly seeking new actors for the roles of criminals(and victims)-of-the-week.
Then again, as Jennifer Aniston noted, when she and Sebastian Stan appeared for an Actors on Actors conversation, hosted by Variety, that way to start a career was actually pretty "fancy". After all, a lot of actors have to start with playing in commercials.
And Stan's role, while a single-episode, was not an insignificant one. In the Season 13 episode Sheltered, he played Justin Capshaw an antisocial teenager whose father (played by Ty Burrell) was accused of gunning down four people. The truth was stranger and even more sinister – hardly a spoiler for Law & Order.
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Perhaps less strangely, Justin's real nature, as an abducted boy, raised in a strict environment void of friends or hobbies, and eventually turned into a killer, the one who actually murdered all those people for the sake of his father, ended up very much foreshadowing Sebastian Stan's best-known role as the above-mentioned Winter Soldier.
As Justin, Sebastian Stan delivered a measured yet emotional performance, playing a teenager who doesn't even fully realize the extent of abuse he has endured. No wonder that he got invitations for a bunch of new roles soon after that episode aired.