Sebastian Stan Makes Cannibals Cool in Hulu’s ‘Fresh’

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the 2022 movie Fresh on Hulu.

You can’t help but laugh when, in his new horror movie Fresh—which began streaming on Hulu today—Sebastian Stan dances around his fancy kitchen to the ’80s bop “Obsession” by Animotion. Of course, he also happens to be slicing up and packaging meat from a human woman’s leg while he dances. But in a deeply messed up, sick-to-your-stomach type of way, it’s charming—and not unlike the cheerful way that Christian Bale brutally murdered his coworker while dancing to Huey Lewis and the News in Mary Harron’s 2000 classic, American Psycho.

While American Psycho brought movie viewers inside the mind of a serial killer, Fresh takes audiences deep into the twisted world of elite cannibalism. Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Noa, a woman who is fed up with modern dating, until she meets a cute guy named Steve (played by Stan) at the grocery store. Noa and Steve have a fantastic first date—so good, in fact, that Noa agrees to go on a weekend away with Steve, despite warnings from her BFF Mollie (Jonica T. Gibbs) that going away to an unknown location with a stranger for a weekend is an objectively insane thing to do.

You likely will not be surprised to see that this decision goes horribly wrong for Noa, but you may be surprised by exactly what kind of monster Steve turns out to be. He drugs her and kidnaps her, yes, but it’s not because he wants to rape or murder her in any “traditional” sense—it’s because he wants to slowly mutilate her to sell her body parts to high-end cannibal clients who pay obscene amounts of money for human meat. “It’s a thing,” Steve tells Noa calmy, and we believe him.

Unlike American Psycho, which follows the slow descent of a wealthy, 1980s New York City banker named Patrick Bateman (played by Christian Bale), Fresh is told from the perspective of Steve’s victims—and therefore affords them far more autonomy than American Psycho ever did for Bateman’s prey. And yet, the most morbidly fascinating parts of Fresh are when viewers are given a glimpse into Steve’s psyche. Like, for example, the montage of him dancing around his kitchen while cutting up and packaging human leg meat. He’s the kind of guy who enjoys his job, and he’s good at it. He has his process down to a science—he saws off the meat, tenderizes it, vacuums seals it, and boxes it up with a photo of the woman it came from, and maybe her bra or panties thrown in, as a bonus. There is no hint of remorse, no speck of disgust or hesitation, only a sociopathic level of satisfaction.

Later in the film, we see another side of Steve. It’s a softer side, a side that doesn’t quite humanize him but does come close. It comes out during a dinner date with Noa, who has been feigning interest in cannibalism in order to gain his trust. (Or is, perhaps, she actually curious? The movie lets you decide.) Noa asks when he first tried human flesh, and he says it was when he was 18 or 19. It was a lonely time, he tells her. “I was a normal kid, and now I had this thing that I couldn’t share with anyone.” Eventually, though, he found what he calls a “community” of cannibals. “That’s when my life started making sense.”

It’s uncomfortable to watch, to say the least, perhaps because you can tell he truly believes his actions are justifiable; that he is simply a misunderstood weirdo who found his people. Stan is best known for playing Bucky—Captain America’s affable, down-to-earth best bud—in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so it may be a shock for his fanbase to see just how good he is at being bad. In fact, Stan did extensive research on real-life violent criminals, and what motivated them, to prepare for his role in Fresh, including working with psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Lewis, an expert in dissociative personality disorders. In an interview for the Fresh press notes, Stan described his character as “a guy who has his life figured out and it’s not an ordinary life, but he’s okay with that.”

It’s a twisted, sinister performance that comes from a place of understanding, and, whether intentional or not, Stan owes a good deal to Bale’s now-iconic portrayal of Patrick Bateman. Like Fresh, Harron’s dark comedy thriller American Psycho originally premiered at Sundance Film Festival, and also like with Fresh, while some critics proclaimed it a revelation, not all were sold—some saw it as glamourized, excessive violence in a distastefully slick package. Fresh, too, was a divisive film at Sundance, and I suspect that divide will become even more pronounced as Hulu subscribers watch it this weekend. But few argued that Bale’s performance as Bateman—the buttoned-up serial killer with a skincare routine and a manic charm— was magnetic and captivating, like a car crash you can’t turn away from. It was the role that shot Bale to stardom.

Stan, of course, is already a pretty big star. But one can’t help but feel his charismatic, cool, and confident take on a man who eats human flesh does for cannibalism what Patrick Bateman did for serial killers. (In the years since American Psycho came out in 2000, serial killer psychoanalysis has become so commonplace, from Ted Bundy to Tiger King, that it’s hard to imagine some found it so shocking just twenty years ago.) I don’t know about the Sebastian Stan stans, but I’ll have trouble ever seeing Bucky the same way again.

Watch Fresh on Hulu