Sebastian Stan Reveals The Unbelievable Lengths He Went To In His Portrayal Of Tommy Lee
The methods that actors use to get into the characters they're portraying can vary from bizarre to downright dangerous. Natalie Portman dislocated a rib and lost over 20 pounds for her role as a ballerina on the brink of a psychotic collapse in "Black Swan," according to Thrillist. "There were some nights that I thought I literally was going to die," Portman told Entertainment Weekly. Jamie Foxx glued his eyes shut to prepare for his role as the legendary musician Ray Charles in the movie, "Ray." "Imagine having your eyes glued shut for 14 hours a day," Foxx said to The New York Times. "That's your jail sentence."
There are some actors who blur the lines between method acting and real life, like the late actor, Heath Ledger, who isolated himself, and dealt with insomnia to prepare for his role as The Joker in "The Dark Knight." "I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going," Ledger said to The New York Times. Meanwhile, Jeremy Strong doesn't even believe in method acting; he believes in something called "identity diffusion," according to the infamous New Yorker article. "If I have any method at all, it is simply this: to clear away anything—anything—that is not the character and the circumstances of the scene," Strong explained.
Now Marvel darling Sebastian Stan will join the ranks of actors pushing the envelope, since he went through some interesting lengths to prepare for his role as Tommy Lee for Hulu's newest miniseries, "Pam & Tommy."
Sebastian Stan gets 'intimate' with an animatronic penis
"Pam & Tommy," is a new miniseries about actor Pamela Anderson and musician Tommy Lee, and there are some pretty wild, sex-fueled scenes. But, none of them hold a candle to one particular moment where the Mötley Crüe drummer has a pep talk with his pee-pee who spoke back to him. This was inspired by an anecdote in Lee's 2005 memoir, "Tommyland," per New York Post.
Actor Sebastian Stan, who is portraying Lee, wasn't phased with this very phallic scene, since he would be using an animatronic penis. Instead, he embraced the phony bone-y and debatably got a little too comfortable with it. "By the end of it, I treated it like it was an intimate buddy conversation that one might have when they're falling in love," Stan said to Variety. However, others were not as embracing of the knockoff knob, like director Craig Gillespie who said that scene was "just awkward." "You've got four puppeteers working with an animatronic penis, and then, how much is too much, and do you start to lose his emotional torment of what's going on? Hopefully it works," Gillespie said.
As whacky as this NSFW situation is, the main message of the story is not lost on Stan. "It's an important story, I think, from being able to understand what the impact of that media tornado really was," he told Variety. "For them as a couple but particularly for her as a woman. I can't imagine what having a private home video stolen from you — how that wouldn't impact a newlywed couple."