Hi there, I popped in here awhile back to mention Sebastian’s gross behavior at a con
This was in 2016 at Wizard World Comic Con in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA—it was in October, but I don’t recall the specific dates; I know there’s video of the incident I’m about to describe, because I remember seeing it circulating around various fan spaces after the fact
I had a front row seat in the Q&A panel in which this incident occurred, so I was able to get a good look at Sebastian’s facial expressions and body language
There was a young female fan attending with her mother—when I say she was young, I mean she was somewhere between 12 and 15 years old—who got a turn with the microphone and was so overcome that she started shaking and crying and struggling to put her words together
Her mom had stood up with her. She was rubbing her daughter’s back and sometimes squeezing her around the shoulders; it was obvious to me (I am also a mom) that she was trying to help calm her daughter down enough to speak coherently so she could have the fan moment she so desperately wanted
Watching the interplay between mom and daughter made me uncomfortable (my daughter was 8 at the time & she had some significant mental health issues growing up; watching a young girl struggle with what looked to be some kind of anxiety disorder was a bit triggering for me) so I watched Sebastian instead
The longer this girl struggled to talk, the closer he paid attention
And when this girl started openly sobbing, he smiled
I think now that he let the whole thing drag out specifically to see if she would cry
I can’t remember if he waited until her knees had given out or if he waited until they were on the verge of giving out but it was at one of those two points that he put the microphone down and ran out into the audience and scooped her up into a long lingering hug
(This young adolescent girl)
Of course there was thunderous applause and fans online gushed about how sweet and wonderful he was to leave the stage and give a hug to a young and obviously overwhelmed fan but I found the whole incident repulsive—if he’d lunged at my crying child like that, and given her the kind of lingering too-intimate hug that he did, I would not have been so nice about it
At the same Q&A, he made sexually suggestive comments to a fan who’d dressed up as the character he had sex with in I, Tonya
And while taking a photo with him, he got handsy with me
Not as handsy as he is with some fans, but I went into the photo op with the idea that I wouldn’t touch him. I was 40 years old—I’m 9 years older than him, for the folks counting at home—very happily married, and I was aware that he was in a relationship, and I was very concerned with not wanting to be a gross fan (I was buying heavily into his “persecuted privacy” narrative at the time & didn’t want to come off as a parasocial weirdo).
But he grabbed me by the hip and pulled me up against him, “with no room for the holy ghost” as my grandma might’ve said
I walked away from all of this with the opinion that he not only encourages obsessive parasocial fan behavior but that he actively craves it; I predict that at some point in the future there will be exploited-fan stories when he can't get the adulation he craves any other way
Like many others, I became a fan of him because of Bucky, Bucky seems to be the gateway drug LOL
I’ll close this testimonial with a petty remark—he’s not hot in person, he’s got kind of a rodent-face that gets flattened or something by the camera, and after seeing him in person I have never been able to look at his photos/movies and see the “attractive” actor that I used to see
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