Vanity Fair – For the Hulu limited series Pam & Tommy, becoming the notorious bad boy drummer required serious dedication both inside and out.
There are many ways to be an icon—but being recognized entirely by your chest is probably a unique one. That’s the pantheon that Tommy Lee is in, at least based on the experience of Pam & Tommy makeup head David Williams, who went nipple-ring shopping in preparation for transforming Sebastian Stan into the famed drummer and tabloid fixture.
“I usually don’t disclose what I’m doing when I go in, but I had pictures of Tommy Lee’s chest,” says Williams of his visit to the Los Angeles piercing parlor Body Electric. “The guy says, ‘Oh, you’re working with Tommy Lee?’ And I was like, ‘By just his chest?!’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I can see with the tattoos.’ Tommy Lee’s tattoos are very identifiable.”
Those tattoos were painstakingly recreated and on constant display in the Hulu streaming series, in which Stan costars alongside Lily James as Pamela Anderson. Thirty-something of them, transferred onto Stan’s body by multiple people simultaneously (“not unlike the Crackerjack tattoos you used to get as a kid,” special makeup effects supervisor Jason Collins says.)
The nipple ring, too, ended up being an illusion, though Stan says he briefly considered just going for the real thing. “And then actually, I saw a video of [Lee] actually talking about piercing your nipples and how apparently it’s like one of the most painful things you can do,” Stan says. “[I thought], Oh, yeah, like that’s probably going to be more traumatic than helpful, like, no.”
Which meant fake nipples—silicone prosthetics, rings included, that when attached to Stan’s body alongside the tattoos transformed him into “dirty boy” Tommy Lee, as Williams put it. The show takes place at the height of Lee’s rock and roll all night and party every day fame, tracking the era of Lee and Anderson’s whirlwind romance and marriage, as well as the stolen sex tape and its fallout. The show speculates on the private moments of Anderson and Lee’s relationships, treating them as sympathetic victims of a life-changing crime.
Though Stan used fewer prosthetics than his costar James, he physically transformed himself for the role, shedding the Marvel bulk from his role in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier to become the gaunter, frequently shirtless Lee. “For a few months I just wasn’t really eating much,” Stan says. “And when we had those shirtless scenes I was sometimes not drinking a lot of water.” As Collins puts it, “Tommy didn’t like to wear a lot of clothes in the show.”
But even with a shirt on, Stan kept the prosthetic nipples in place—just one of many indications of how seriously he and the crew took his immersion in the role. Stan listened to endless interviews and videos and read Lee’s biography, Tommyland, describing him as “very passionate and intense,” a kinetic force. “He’s always moving,” Stan continues. “And there’s just music kind of always playing in his head.”
Stan learned how to play the drums, impressing even musicians with his abilities gained in a short period of time. Between takes, he’d listen to his ’80s power-rock playlist. Lake Bell, who directed two episodes, says she was stunned by Stan’s “fucking awesome and relentless commitment to Tommy, and his fearlessness and sense of humor about himself and about his body, and his joy in relishing in the icon that this man is and was. It’s just really fun to watch.”
Coshowrunner DV DeVincentis calls Stan’s transformation “really, really elegant and organic…. I’m not gonna say this about Tommy Lee, but the character certainly is less intelligent than Sebastian, and less thoughtful and less considerate and considered person.” James, for her part, called Stan “one of the greatest scene partners you could ever wish for.”
The dynamic between Pam and Tommy is, true to the title, at the heart of the show—but it was Stan’s relationship with another onscreen partner that might have presented the biggest physical challenge. Stan calls it the “talking confessional scene,” but you may know it as the one where he stands naked in front of a mirror and chats with his penis, and his penis talks back. Literally.
Collins was also in charge of what he called Stan’s “specialized appendage,” which required two extra personnel on the call sheet to operate: Mike McCarty and Dave Snyder, who acted as penis puppeteers.
Before shooting, Collins had Stan come into his studio to get a lifecast of his pelvis made—to “get a sense of the landscape,” as he puts it. Stan, he says, had a great sense of humor about it. “We’d had a conversation. He was like, ‘Well, I guess we’re into it.’ And I go, ‘yep.’”
Stan, Collins, and the others weren’t sure that the scene, which was based on part of Lee’s book, Tommyland, would even make the final cut of the show. The penis puppet rig was attached to Stan with straps, later digitally edited out, with cables running down the back of his legs. One puppeteer controlled the overall movements—side to side, up and down—of the penis, while the other was its mouthpiece. Surprisingly enough, it worked.
“His journey was just one of tattoos, fake nipples,” coshowrunner Rob Siegel says. “He had fake brass balls, didn’t he?” No, Siegel doesn’t mean metaphorically. “Like metal balls that he kept in his pants…. He showed them to me.”
DeVincentis praises Stan’s handling of the complex puppetry and keeping the surreal scene from turning into a farce. “The amount of stuff that Sebastian had to sort of hide. I mean, first of all his own business, but then wires and animatronic control stuff, and then play a scene really, really beautifully while having to deal with all that.”
“I think that the writers kind of found a way to honor something that was specifically in his book, Tommyland, and kind of find a way to use it that further tells the story about what’s happening, which is about a guy falling in love with a woman,” Stan says.
So it came back, as everything on Pam & Tommy did, to that central relationship. According to James, that sense of unity was key for both of them in deciding to jump into the series in the first place. “I remember he texted me really early on going, you know what, I’m gonna need my hand held at times, and I wanna hold yours and I’m there for you,” she remembers. “I’ve got this, we’ve got each other’s backs.”
Stan admits to being “really, really terrified,” which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “I’ve learned that fear is a good indicator to me that there’s something I need to explore further or sometimes you want to have that challenge and under pressure,” He says. “At the end, everybody seemed very grateful and happy that people connected with the show. They sort of revisited the story, they saw it, took another look at it. And the conversation just continues. That’s what’s important.”