I’ve added over 100+ high quality of Sebastian in the Deadline Contenders – The Nominees interview to the gallery. You can also view a clip (not the full interview) that Deadline posted below.
‘Pam & Tommy’s Lily James & Sebastian Stan Reveal The “Personal” & “Full-On” Nature Of The Hulu Drama https://t.co/8XBQsJ4rVf#DeadlineContenders pic.twitter.com/Bhzv6ZWUVn
— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) August 6, 2022
Sebastian attended Hulu’s FYC “Clips + Conversation” Event For Hulu’s “Pam & Tommy” back in June. I’ve added more photos from the event to the gallery including new ones from inside during the event.Thank you to Elizabeth-Olsen.com for the help with some of the photos.
LA Times – ‘Pam & Tommy’: A tale of up-dos, fake breasts, tattoos … and a talking penis
The outrageous story of the internet’s first celebrity sex tape so frequently borders on the absurd that any retelling could quickly become a farce. To avoid that fate, the Hulu limited series “Pam & Tommy” faithfully and meticulously re-creates the 1990s tale about the whirlwind romance of “Baywatch” star Pamela Anderson and Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, and the torturous consequences of a stolen videotape of their honeymoon lovemaking.
Where many productions might use computer-generated wizardry, the hair and makeup team here relied on handcrafted artistry and every tool in their arsenal. The crew’s many challenges included transforming Lily James, a pale, slight British actress, into Anderson, the perennially tanned, busty Malibu sex symbol — and making a rock star’s penis talk.
As head of the makeup department, David Williams controlled every character’s look — including actors playing Tommy Lee and his Motley Crue bandmates, Jay Leno, Hugh Hefner, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione and private investigator Anthony Pellicano. He coordinated Barry Lee Moe’s wig and hairstyling team and the special effects from Jason Collins of Van Nuys’ Autonomous F/X, which crafted dozens of face and body prosthetics.
“The Lily makeup is the most comprehensive character makeup that I think any of us have done,” said Williams, a three-time Emmy winner who is also nominated for the Peacock limited series “Angelyne.”
”The vast majority of creating this look was painting highlights and shadows and contours and restructuring a great structure that was already there. We were turning one beautiful woman into another beautiful woman,” Williams said.
Moe designed and styled 27 custom wigs handcrafted by Wigmaker Associates in Beverly Hills, including Anderson’s trendsetting messy up-dos. James managed to disguise her British accent wearing dentures to invoke Anderson’s capped-teeth smile.
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Variety – Awards Circuit Podcast: “Pam & Tommy” stars Sebastian Stan and Lily James.
Sebastian Stan was on set and Lily James was in the middle of a massage when the Emmy nominations were announced earlier this month. Both became first time nominees, thanks to their work on the Hulu limited series “Pam & Tommy,” which was also nominated for outstanding limited or anthology series.
The Emmy nominated pair guest on the Awards Circuit podcast this week – in separate interviews – and discuss how they immersed themselves into the roles of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. James also reveals what it was like going back and watching “Baywatch” to prepare for the role and the stress of putting herself in Anderson’s shoes during some of the emotionally grueling scenes. Stan discusses moments he can relate to being in the eye of the public (right before his interview, he was escaping paparazzi) and delves into working with his acting coach Larry Moss, who helped him prepare for Tommy. Listen below!
First up, James discusses how watching Anderson’s early work was key to her “Pam & Tommy” portrayal – including the star’s breakthrough role in “Baywatch.” Asked how the show show holds up today, James says, “A lot of montages, a lot of rock ballads. A lot of Pamela looking fucking amazing. You know what, it really stands up. And I can see why it took the world by storm because it’s like these beautiful people on a beach, literally saving the world.”
While James found a lot to enjoy about playing Pam, she also admits that there were scenes that took a toll on her – and how your body doesn’t always know the difference when you’re acting.
“If you’re sat in a room with loads of men in those depositions scenes diminishing you and shaming you, your body takes that on,” she reveals.
Though “Pam & Tommy” is very sympathetic to Anderson thanks largely to James’ sensitive performance, Anderson has said publicly she doesn’t plan on watching the series. And James understands why. “It’s tricky,” she says. “It’s such a big conversation and something that I still think about on a daily basis.”
Next up, Stan talks about being followed by photographers prior to the interview and how he feels it’s only a sliver compared to what Pam and Tommy had to go through after their private sex tape was stolen and shared with the world. “I can understand, a little bit, the invasion of privacy aspect,” he says. “Obviously not on their scale and certainly not on the scale of a woman who’s also trying to be a mother and all the other things.”
He goes on to say that he knows how lucky he is to succeed in his profession. “Sometimes I go, you know Sebastian, suck it up. You’re lucky and you chose this profession, you got in this thing. And I return to gratitude.” He also discusses the highlights of being in the public eye – like seeing a kid become excited upon recognizing him.
Stan also talks about how he first came to work with Moss when trying out for “The Green Lantern.” While auditioning for Mike Nichols’ Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman,” Moss spent a week with Stan, telling the actor to come to their meetings dressed as the character every day. Even though Stan didn’t get either part (Nichols felt he was more of a Biff than a Happy and Biff was already cast with Andrew Garfield), he found an invaluable resource in Moss — whom he continues to work with to this day.
Stan also discusses the infamous scene where Tommy talks to his penis – including the suggestion for one of his Marvel co-stars to voice it and how he didn’t know that it would eventually be actor Jason Mantzoukas. Stan now calls the choice “smart”: “He has the right kind of tone, he’s just trying to rein him back in from going down this cliff.”
SPIN Magazine -Sebastian Stan Is a One-Man Mötley Crüe
Mötley Crüe ruled the metal scene in the late ‘80s, going on to sell over 100 million records. However, by the time Sebastian Stan was the right age to appreciate the glam band, the metal heyday had passed. “Unfortunately, I didn’t really know Mötley Crüe when I was growing up,” Stan says, “because when I was in high school, it was already a grunge world.”
But that didn’t stop the Romanian-born actor from discovering the band later, telling SPIN, “I personally gravitate towards the ’80s.” So, despite not growing up on the iconic group, he eventually came to love them. Eventually becoming intimately familiar with one of the band members by playing him on TV.
Stan, 39, is currently garnering praise for his portrayal of Crüe drummer Tommy Lee in the Hulu drama Pam and Tommy, a fictionalized retelling of the stolen sex tape that became a cultural touchstone — and a punchline, despite the fact that it was a criminal invasion of privacy. The early episodes introduce the cocky musician as he meets and falls immediately in love (didn’t we all?) with Baywatch starlet Pamela Anderson (played by an incandescent Lily James). The later episodes delve deep into how poorly the situation was handled legally, culturally, and personally by the world at large.
On March 4, Stan stars in another Hulu original, the comedy thriller Fresh as the new boyfriend of a young woman (Daisy Edgar-Jones) navigating the horror that is the modern dating scene, which critics have hailed as a scathing critique on “toxic male sexuality and attitudes to women.” Thematically, the film complements the message of Pam and Tommy, with both projects examining gender dynamics in pop culture.
And then there’s Stan’s ongoing super cool role as super-soldier Bucky Barnes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, most recently in the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. While no future plans for that series have been announced, Stan, all cagey, tells SPIN he won’t rule out another turn in the MCU. Read on for more about how he prepared for his role as Tommy Lee, his favorite karaoke songs, ’90s fashion and if we’ll see him again busting heads alongside Sam Wilson.
SPIN: How naturally did the Tommy Lee character come to you?
Sebastian Stan: Not very naturally – I don’t have a tattoo on my body, I’ve never played the drums before; I don’t play any instruments. I sing karaoke for fun, but I have nothing to really relate to. It was going to be a massive journey of research that I was about to embark on.
What is your karaoke song?
Oh my God, I have so many. There’s great Elvis songs, Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses. I’ve definitely thrown in some Mötley Crüe. And Billy Joel – very, very important.
So you’re a classics karaoke guy.
I stick to the ones that have a lot of heart, all right? “New York State of Mind,” “Just the Way You Are.”
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Hulu has released the video panel for their FYC event featuring ‘Pam and Tommy’. You can view the photos of the event here. You can click below to watch the entire FYC Panel and also view the screen captures in the gallery.
Indie Wire – The actors discuss with IndieWire the challenges of portraying real people as well as the first moment they saw each other in costume as the ’90s icons.
Lily James and Sebastian Stan were nervous. The anxiety began with the mountains of research they faced in an effort to learn everything about Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee for Hulu’s limited series “Pam & Tommy.” They also learned that they enjoyed the pressure.
“I genuinely feel that fear is a good thing,” Stan said in an IndieWire Awards Spotlight conversation with James. “If we can figure out a way to have a healthy relationship with it, it’s sort of a weird awakening feeling [because] it really does feel like you’re on your toes.”
James noted that her nerves came from fear of “failure; not having the ability to do what’s demanded for this,” she said. “To not be able to capture any essence or any traits and really be believable as this real person that you genuinely want to inhabit.”
Happily, the two earned rave reviews for their performances as the larger-than-life ‘90s stars on the series that followed their happy, rapid courtship — followed by the relationship’s deterioration after a disgruntled worker stole private sex tape from their home. The show is at its best when it zooms out to show the beginnings of concepts like public figures’ right to privacy and the all-consuming internet.
“In the TV show, we were the [constants],” James said. “And with these amazing directors that came in… I felt this great sort of power that we had in that it was ours, we’ve taken on these roles. There was an adrenaline to that. And it [felt] out of control at the best of times in the acting, but in control in this ownership of this thing. That was addictive.”
So addictive, in fact, that the duo remained deeply connected to their characters. Stan and James noted they would check in with each other regularly during emotionally difficult scenes, and also became quite the on-set defenders of Lee and Anderson’s one-time love.
Production would say, “‘we’re moving forward into the show, we need to show how the relationship is getting [negatively] affected by all these things,’” Stan explained. “We’re like, ‘I know, but they really loved each other!’”
“It’s weird,” Stan said later. “You can feel nostalgic about it and then suddenly I’ll have to remind myself, ‘That’s not your life, bro.’ Let them have their life back.”
Note: The complete video interview is at the IndieWire link above. I’ve added screen captures to the gallery.
Indie Wire – Behind the Whirlwind Romance of ‘Pam & Tommy,’ There’s a Longstanding Creative Partnership
Australian director Craig Gillespie creates an energy in his images that brings the emotional undercurrent of his characters to life. He invites you into their space to wash in their feelings without saying too much. It’s the result of close collaboration with key department heads, a dynamic that editor Tatiana Riegel was first introduced to on 2007’s “Lars and the Real Girl.” “Craig is remarkably collaborative and secure in his own feelings and ideas to not insist upon them but he allows people to interpret them where he can then say yes or no,” she told IndieWire.
Riegel said their efforts have blossomed over the course of projects like “I, Tonya” (for which she earned an Oscar nomination), “Cruella,” “The United States of Tara” in part, because even though they “are very different people, the yin and yang of it works pretty well.” Gillespie has grown fond of how effortlessly the editor navigates outside the box. “We did our first assembly of ‘Lars’ and there was an interview scene between Ryan [Gosling] and Patricia Clarkson [who plays a therapist] that I thought was too long,” he said. “Tatiana said, ‘Maybe it’s in the wrong place.’ So we pulled out the scene cards and rearranged the whole second half of the film and that scene never got shorter. Since then, we’ve never settled on the structure of the script and we’ll always think about moving something around or tightening.
The simpatico relationship gives Riegel the “courage to try things” she might otherwise be conservative about with someone new, a trust that continued into the first trio of episodes of “Pam & Tommy,” Hulu’s limited series about how the infamous Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape found its way onto the web.
Creator Robert Siegel based “Pam & Tommy” on a 2014 Rolling Stone article that details how the “Baywatch” star and Mötley Crüe drummer first met, and the “karma” that led to their private life being exposed. After stripping away the public persona and glamor of these two famous icons – portrayed convincingly well by Lily James and Sebastian Stan — “Pam & Tommy” depicts a couple unequivocally supporting each other while falling deeper in love — until it collapses.
“The tone was incredibly clear to me and that’s something I always look for when searching for something to work on,” Gillespie said. “If I can visualize it while I’m reading [the script], half the job is done.”
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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.”
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Hollywood Reporter – ‘Pam & Tommy’ Editor Reflects on Scene That Was a “Pivotal Turning Point”
Talking about reteaming with her I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie on Pam & Tommy, Oscar-nominated editor Tatiana S. Riegel describes the stories Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, and that of Tonya Harding, as “misunderstood.”
“I actually find them kind of similar, the two stories,” Riegel says in a new episode of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Behind the Screen podcast. “Because of the length of time (since the events occurred), a lot of people either didn’t know anything about it, or had a preconception of what the stories were going to be — often a very judgmental preconception.”
“I knew there was going to be a certain emotional level to it,” Riegel adds of Gillespie being at the helm. “And it would be intriguing in addition to his comic sense, [showcasing] his ability to sort of walk back and forth between those two places in a lovely way.”
A favorite scene for Riegel, whose work with Gillespie also includes Disney’s Cruella, occurs in episode two and features newlyweds Pam (Lily James) and Tommy (Sebastian Stan) at home one night watching TV as Pam introduces her husband to The King and I. She sings “Getting to Know You” from the classic musical as the pair playfully giggle and dance around the bedroom.
“That particular scene was a real pivotal turning point, emotionally, in the story,” Riegel says. “This is a really unusual scene, to have a character like Tommy Lee watching this musical. She’s so into it. I find it to be this really sweet, vulnerable scene that they both are participating in. And I feel like that really cracks the door open for the rest of the season.”
During the conversation, Riegel also discusses her approach to film editing, including why she “avoids the set at all costs.”
“I have a lot of work to do, number one. And number two, I think [being on set] influences my perception,” Riegel says. [When] I watch the dailies … I try to hold onto … my first emotional reaction–to a take, a line, a performance, whatever it is, as whether it’s genuine or real, or made me laugh or made me cry.”
“[But] there’s a very classic thing that happens where things are hysterical on the set,” she continues. “Everybody loves it. And when it actually comes into the cutting room and you watch it in dailies, it’s not so funny anymore, or vice versa. And so everybody’s like, ‘That seemed so much funnier on the day.’ It’s not an editorial thing. It’s just a translation thing. …. It’s like watching a comedy at home alone, versus with a huge audience. It’s a different experience.”