Category: Trailers

SPIN: Sebastian Stan is a one-man Mötley Crüe. We sat down with the actor, who is currently garnering praise for his portrayal of Crüe drummer Tommy Lee in the Hulu drama Pam & Tommy (via Jean Bentley) – Read the entire interview @ this location.

EXCERPT

In a lot of your interviews about Pam and Tommy, you’ve talked a lot about the animatronic penis and nipple rings. It’s really interesting to look at the questions you’ve gotten through the lens of what Pamela experiences in the later episodes — this extremely invasive thing happened to her, and people are cracking jokes about it and constantly asking her about it. Have you thought about those more invasive questions through the lens of what she faced?

I think it shows us something very interesting and revealing about the media: the clickbait mentality that we live in hasn’t really changed much. I think that’s one of the things that I felt was really smart about the show. It starts off a certain way and takes you on this journey and the projections that people threw on those earlier episodes, particularly [the talking penis] scene — the fact that it was talked to the extent that it was and the amount of press that it got as opposed to some of the heavier themes in the show certainly to me felt very revealing.

We sometimes discard the humanistic aspects of certain stories, and we gravitate towards something that, well, sells. That’s what’s sad to me about the show and certainly something that says a lot about the times, that the beginning of the internet and where we’ve arrived today. To some extent, a lot hasn’t changed.

At the core of the show, there were two people who fell madly in love who had just gotten together. She was trying to be a mom. She wanted to have a family. She wanted to also have another path for herself. Every time she tried to take that path, there was another closed door in her face. Certainly, I think in the later episodes you really do see what the impact of this whole thing was, and that there should be a shift in attention to those particular details.

What is something that surprised you about Tommy Lee that you learned in the course of making the show?

The way he grew up, which we don’t really explore in the show. Tommy came after his mother had, I believe, at least four or maybe five miscarriages. His mother was Greek and his father had a background in the army. His parents had married in this span of four days, very similar to how he and Pamela got married. His father went to Greece, met his mom, they got married. Then she came to the U.S. So for the beginning of his childhood formative years, his mother actually didn’t speak English. There’s something there to be said about your own mom not being able to communicate to you right away in those formative years. Actually, his parents used to communicate through pictures. This is all on YouTube. He talks about it extensively. I think that heavily informed him discovering the drums because it came from a place of wanting to be heard.

Read the entire interview @ this location.