Stavros Halkias: “If I’m being successful, I am dying.”

For the latest episode of GQ’s weekly interview series One More Question, Zach Baron sits down with comedian, actor, and podcaster Stavros Halkias to talk about life, death, and living deliciously in the entertainment industry.Over the past few years, Stavros Halkias has been falling apart at the seams: a bad back has recently had him downing edibles (“drugs for children,” as he calls them) to manage the pain so that he can sit across from me in a chair and do all the other things required of a modern multi-hyphenate funny person whose success is predicated on being omnipresent.He’s got his own podcast, Stavvy’s World, a solo act following Cum Town, the chaotic pod that put him in the spotlight, where and his co-hosts, Nick Mullen and Adam Friedland, shuffled up to the edge of decency before gleefully leaping off it it. Somewhat, improbably, Stavvy’s World has become an evolved and tender advice channel for young and disaffected men.Halkias has been acting, too: in Shane Gillis’ Tires, in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, and in this summer’s Tony, the Anthony Bourdain biopic that has Halkias playing his favorite role: “The bully with a heart of gold,” as Halkias put it to me. “My goal is to be the blank with the heart of gold. I want to be the scumbag with the heart of gold, the cuck with a heart of gold, the criminal with a heart of gold. I want to do all that stuff.”His new special, Uncle Stav (his second for Netflix, the first being 2023’s Stavros Halkias: Fat Rascal) is a frankly hilarious hour in which Halkias contemplates issues with his health (poor), his addictions (numerous), and his lifestyle (enviable… sort of). “I was living deliciously,” Halkias said in our conversation. “And you die if you do that too much.”As we discuss, Halkias may in fact be doing too much. But what choice does he have?The following conversation is lightly edited and condensed from the latest episode of One More Question with Zach Baron. Watch below or on YouTube. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.I am genuinely intimidated. I’ve talked to many Oscar winners and people like that. But now I’m talking with the podcast king.Now you're here in the mud with me. Honestly, culture has degraded so much that famous people have to podcast. These are the sewers of entertainment, which I have risen out of. I'm basically the Toxic Avenger of entertainment. And now even GQ has to do it. Once SmartLess happened, that was the canary in the coal mines — like, a lot of these motherfuckers are going to start podcasting. I can't believe it's the only profitable part of show business.Normally this would be an insane place to start, but it's where you start your special more or less, which is with your body. You say in the special that you needed a cortisone shot in your back just to do it. You were taking steroids for your voice. How are you feeling today?Pretty bad. My body's just crumbling, dude. My health has been insane. I threw my back out right before Tires started. The week before I was deadlifting, which feels unfair — to have an injury from trying to get healthy. And then I broke my arm before filming this movie Comeback King with Judd Apatow and Glen Powell. So yeah, I feel bad. I'm trying to stop doing drugs and eating like shit all the time because that's the best way to get through stress for me.How's that going for you, stopping doing drugs?I tried. I was like, "All right, we shot the special. Now my work is done." And then no, you have to edit it, you have to promote it. And so I tried, and then my back hurt, and then I couldn't sleep. It's really pathetic. I'm addicted to edibles. It's so funny. They are drugs for children. The way we do drugs now is gummy bears — what a pathetic and infantilized generation millennials are. But I'm addicted to those. I take a handful of candy that fucks you up every night. And I tried to stop and I couldn't sleep. And my PT was like, "Hey, is something different with your sleep?" I was like, "Yeah, man." I'm like, "I'm trying to stop smoking weed." And he was like, "Legally, I can't tell you to do anything." But he was like, "I wouldn't do anything that disrupts your sleep right now." So a doctor told me to keep getting fucked up, as far as I'm concerned. So I’ve regressed. I’ve fully relapsed. I have three more weeks of this press run. And if I stay alive through that, I think I can fix my whole life after that.But only after that.I have no ability to multitask. If I'm being successful, I am dying. Every time I succeed, it's like I'm trading part of my life force for this success. It's purely transactional to me.That's such a grim thing to say.That's what has happened to me. The two most successful years of my life easily shaved four to five years off of my total life.Is that a trade that you accept?No! If I'd known about it ahead of time, no. But this is Aesop's Fables shit. It's like: You get everything you want and it kills you.There is a joke about this in your special where you say something to the effect of, “During a time not that long ago, I was going to bed and I didn't know if I would wake up in the morning.”I phrased it more funny than that. It was really sad when you said it. That's what I do. I say fucked up shit, but people laugh. Are you familiar with the concept of standup comedy? I'm trying to find humor in the darkest moments of my life.And it's my job to take all the humor out of it.The first taste of mainstream success I had was probably, I forget the year, maybe ’23 or ’22. In that year I did a theater tour, shot my first Netflix special, second special overall, did an indie movie. We shot season one of Tires and I started Stavvy’s World that year, and that was just all great stuff. But I was not prepared for it. I wasn't prepared for that workload. I wasn't prepared to do that many things. I had no guardrails back then. And it was also off the pandemic a little bit. It was like: Leave your house and just go get fucked up, do all the fun stuff you haven't been able to do. And it was just bad timing. It was like you're handed everything. It was both celebratory and stressful, which is the perfect storm to just completely give in to your vices. I was just eating like shit, getting high, a couple pills mixed in, a little drink, though I was never really a drinking guy. Just to get through it. But also because I had a good time doing it. And then I was like, "Damn, it's kind of hard to breathe right now. If somebody unplugs this CPAP machine, shit's going bad in this Courtyard Marriott.” So yeah, there were times where I thought that for sure. It's kind of like the end of The Witch. It's like: “Would you like to live deliciously?” I was living deliciously, and you die if you do that too much.There is a fascinating thread that I think runs through a lot of your work, which is on the one hand it's like: I have the best life ever. And on the other hand, and this is another joke from your special: I can't keep a gun in the house because I might shoot myself.You're really highlighting the stuff to make me sound suicidal. That's the one joke about killing myself, Zach.I'm curious how those two things interact.That doesn't seem that weird to me. I mean, to want to have this kind of life, something's wrong with your head. You have to be mentally ill to want to do this, right? I was always a little kid who loved attention. I have some kind of learning disability where it's like, I can't focus on anything, but when I lock into shit, I'm really in the zone. And I think the classic mix to make an artist, you have to be a narcissist, you have to believe in yourself so fucking much, and you also have to think you're a piece of shit. And I think I had the classic overdoting immigrant mother, like a caricature — my friends would come over just to pick me up for the movies and she would flag them down and make them wait while she made brownies. The sweetest little Greek lady of all time. And my dad, who was just very charismatic, very funny. I get a lot of stuff from him, but he also was a lot harder. I felt a lot of pressure from him and there was just the classic: Your mom thinks you can do anything you want. Your dad doesn't really believe in you. And then you throw in body image stuff, you throw in everything else that other people deal with. I noticed this in a lot of people who do standup, who do other creative stuff: You have to think you're super talented to want to do this, but you also have to think you suck and you're a piece of shit to keep trying to improve. The logical conclusion is: My life's awesome and I want to kill myself at the same time when everything's cooking.You've been very upfront about your demons, some of which we have already talked about. But I'm curious about how you're dealing with what I would say is probably the newest demon in your life, which is the fame and the success that you're talking about.I really don't like it, to be honest with you. I never imagined that I would have this career this quickly. Yorgos Lanthimos, I owe him so much. I got bailed out by a couple random texts from more talented guys. But where the fuck did he find me? Was Yorgos watching Tires, season one? Is that where he fucking found me? I hadn't done shit. You know what I mean? Did he watch Let's Start a Cult [the 2024 indie film that Halkias co-wrote and starred in]? I don't think so. But the reason I did Let's Start a Cult was because I was like, hopefully one day I could be just in the character actor stable of a great director. What I wanted to get to was, maybe in 10 years, I could be like how the Coen brothers have their repertory guys. You know what I mean? I could be [Jon] Polito. You know what I mean? I could be Dennis Franz in early DePalma stuff. I was hoping one day I could be that guy. And I got that opportunity before I got to do a broad comedy, which I couldn't understand. But to be able to do that kind of stuff, you kind of have to be famous. Especially now, where the entire industry has become sort of a bringer. When you first start comedy, the shows you do are like, "Hey, you can do it, but you have to bring five people." Now it's like, "Hey, you got to bring a million Instagram followers if you're going to be..." You have to keep being famous. You can't just be good at something anymore. That's done.It sucks. I love standup, but I feel like it's the thing I have to trick people into coming to because they see me podcasting, acting, they see a clip go viral, whatever. But in general, that's how the entertainment industry feels now. It's like you have to quietly work on your art and get better at everything while also being famous because nobody has any infrastructure anymore and everybody expects you to do everything. And so you have to keep getting famous because I want to keep making movies. I want to keep doing standup specials. I want to tour till I die. I love standup. And to do that, you just kind of have to have fans and be famous.Nobody likes to talk about this because it sounds like you're complaining, but I'm sure it's also just deeply weird when you're walking through an airport or whatever.My perspective is other people's workplace hazard is getting black lung. My workplace hazard is a bunch of guys that look like me stop me when I go get bagels. You know what I mean? And most of the time I actually really like it. The only time it's tough is if you're having a bad day. I remember one time I had just made an attempt to get this girl back. We were talking. She had started dating somebody who was fresh and I was like, "I think I might have a little window here to get back in. Maybe I can grab the cheese before the trap hits me." And I gave it my all. We're getting oysters. I picked a beautiful restaurant. I'm making my pitch. I'm like, "Let's be together, baby. I fucked up so bad." She hits me with a, "No, absolutely not. Are you out of your fucking mind? I tried to do this. You're just a piece of shit who can't accept love until it's gone." And that fucked me up and I'm walking home trying to keep it together. And some guy's like, "STAV! MY BOY! FLACO!” And I'm like, "Come on. I'm fucking crying, dude. I'm heartbroken with a belly full of oysters and I got to fucking make a video for your friend. You want me to set the fantasy football order of your draft this year right now? Dude, I can't do that for you, man." So that's the only time it's a problem. But most of the time, like I said, I live a hysterical life and on a regular day, if I got to say hi to a couple people, that's nice. I actually like it.And all of this comes from a podcast called Cum Town that you did with Adam Friedland and Nick Mullen. Did you think that show, which began in 2016, was going to be as successful as it was?I thought we would do eight episodes. I was doing it to appease my buddy Nick. At the time he was like, "Let's do a podcast." I was like, "Dude, podcasts are over." [Marc] Maron did it. In 2015, it felt kind of like that first wave of podcasts had crested. Little did we know, I think the year we started ended up a whole bunch of other things launched. We launched. The Doughboys, Pardon My Take, Blank Check. And I'm sure I'm missing a ton. Those are just the ones in my world. And Nick was right. And no, of course I didn't think it would work. It was one of those things where it's like, “Yeah, who gives a fuck?” We can buy a Zoom and three microphones and see what happens. And it ended up being wildly successful beyond anybody's dreams.Did you understand at the time what people liked about it?I think what people liked on an immediate level is just: It was recreating the middle school cafeteria table. It's like three dumbasses saying insane shit to make each other laugh. It's like, how funny can you get inside the intimacy of a real friendship and once you have buy-in and trust each other? The funniest jokes to make are saying the most fucked up things, because how far can you push it while the other person still knows you're a good person is kind of the joke. And if you're really good friends with someone, you can say insane stuff. Now we happened to broadcast that to people who do not know us personally at all. I think that was the ultimate appeal. And really it was funny as shit. I mean, Mullen is one of the best. In terms of riffing, Nick Mullen is a savant on podcasts.Were you guys actually friends?We were friends for sure. And we're still friends now, by the way. But doing the show, when it started, yes, we were just broke friends who couldn't get anything going and we were like, "Let's just do a podcast." And there were definitely times within it where you work that closely with people, it's tough. We had very different styles, all three of us, just as guys. Truly, it was mostly planning shit and organizing. We just never had a set schedule the first two, three years, and that drove me fucking crazy. We always recorded at Nick’s house. It was these petty things. But I do feel like we had an incredible chemistry when we were really cooking. But no, we were boys. But yes, there were definitely times where we almost quit the show, we didn't want to do it, whatever, and it was for the dumbest, pettiest bullshit. I think getting a little break from it has really just allowed us… And then when I left, it was like, yeah, I felt like I have to, for a little bit, separate myself, show that I'm something different. Because when you do something that's so successful, you do have the risk of being cast as that guy.For context, in 2022, at a time when the show was incredibly successful, you quit.We were making so much money and I quit. It was the scariest thing I've ever done in my life. I was getting a check for, I don't even remember, like 40 grand a month or something. If nothing else happened in my career but that, I still would've considered it a success. You don't get to that level in comedy most of the time. I was working clubs. I was doing basically my initial dream, but I just realized it wasn't exactly what I wanted. And as much as I love Nick and as funny as he is, it was his show first and foremost. And I did feel like a support player, which now I'm happy to do in these broader contexts because it's stuff I'm interested, in like movies, whatever, but I didn't want to be the second guy on a Cum podcast when I was 45. And so it was a really scary thing to do. I had just paid for my first special out of pocket. Nobody wanted it, so I did it myself on YouTube and I just lost 50 grand on that. I had to spend another 50 grand on the Stavy’s World studio after that. And so it was a really scary moment right after leaving, but I was just like, great.Do you think it could have kept going or do you think it had to end?It had to end. I mean, that's the other thing: that's a young man's game. “At a Medium Pace,” one of the funniest things of all time — Adam Sandler's not still doing that. We made awesome dumb bullshit. The stuff I would've loved when I was 14, we made that and that's cool, but you don't want to be that guy forever. But I think that relationship can go on in different ways. Nick comes on my podcast all the time. I've had Adam on. I'd love to someday collaborate on something when it makes sense. But in that context, no, I don't think it could have gone on.It's funny because as you're becoming famous for this kind of edgelord podcast, you have this very sincere dream, which is to become good at standup comedy.That's it. I want to make one great standup special. That's the only thing I want to accomplish. I think I'm good at standup, but I think that doesn't mean you've created a great special. I think you can be great at standup and great live, and that doesn't mean you've created a great, lasting thing. There's no testament, one thing. And look, that might be naive, right? Maybe what's going to be great is a body of work, right? But still, you still want to chase that one just undeniable special.And yet you still podcast.It pays so much fucking money, dude. I got to pay the bills. I see podcasting as the most blue collar thing I do. It's on a schedule, we do it, we book it, and people depend on it. I like podcasts, too, and I would be mad if my favorite podcast just stopped or if they were late a day or whatever. And so it's the most job-like thing I do. I've done it in a way where I'm like, “Oh, this is actually really fun now.” But would I stop if I financially didn't need to? Honestly, I like doing it. The only reason I might is because I do have this sneaking suspicion that I'm just wasting a lot of being-funny on the podcast, which other generations would get to channel into their standup. I just think there's only so much of yourself you can give. Like I do wonder, are we shittier at standup as a generation because we're all podcasters?For those that don't know, on Stavvy’s World, people call in and you give them advice. You've joked in the past that it's basically incel outreach. How much truth is in that joke?I never planned it to be that way, but I do think so much of culture is a bunch of jacked dudes telling you to be mean to girls and do karate. I'm like, "Hey, no, actually I'm fat and bald and my life's fucking awesome." I'm not saying you can hit this lottery —It's a rare lottery.I don't think anyone who looks like me has a better life. I think I have the best life for these stats. But still I do think I provide a separate thing, which is: Find something you like, gain a little confidence, develop a sense of style. It doesn't have to be conventional, but just kind of be yourself and just treat women as people and shit'll be good. And again, I say it all the time: if this manosphere shit was around when I was a pathetic little 13-year-old that couldn't make eye contact with girls, and they're like, "Actually, you have to be racist and then they'll fuck you," I'd be like, "Nice, I guess I'm racist now." You know what I mean? Because as a little kid, all you want is attention from girls. And if they're like, "You have to control them, you have to trick them into loving you," I would've been like, "Whatever you say, Andrew Tate.” It's completely fucked. I know there's plenty of past-mes right now, and it's like: “You don't have to be that, boys. We got another way. Here's another way, another path."One thing I find very endearing about you is that it feels like underneath all the jokes is a very sincere person whose core beliefs are, like, People don't talk to other people enough, and: We should have more communal spaces.A hundred percent. Unfortunately, I don't think those are boomer beliefs. If they were boomer beliefs, our fucking world would be a lot better. Boomer beliefs are like, "I'm not selling my fucking house. Stop buying avocado toast." Yes, we need more third spaces. We need to invest in infrastructure. I wish those were mainstream boomer beliefs, but they're not. But yeah, I've always said comedy-wise, I am a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps conservative. I'm like, "There are no handouts. You just have to make it happen. I don't give a fuck if he's a nepo baby. Go be funnier than him. You know what I mean? Shut the fuck up. No one deserves an entertainment career. Just try and do it." But in my life, I'm the exact opposite, where I'm like, "Just being alive, we should have a social safety net.” You know what I mean? People shouldn't be disposable. Your boss shouldn't be able to just ruin your life if you cross them. And I don't even see those as controversial beliefs at all. But also, that's not really what I'm interested in talking about.The new special is called “Uncle Stav” because your brother recently had a kid, and you use this as a way to, if not embrace adult responsibility, then to at least contemplate the possibility of doing it. Is that something that's really on your mind?Absolutely. I mean, I'm 37. I feel like a little ass kid. That's the thing with entertainment or any bullshit career. You're not around people who actually fucking have to live real lives with real responsibility. I remember my brother was telling me he was thinking about having a kid a few years ago, and I was like, "He's a baby boy." He was fully 33 years old. But I was like, "You just got married!" But it's like all my friends. My friend just had a kid at 50. You know what I mean? You want to be one of those pathetic old guys with plugs and veneers trying to fuck the hostess at a restaurant? You know what I mean? I don't want to be. You see a lot of fucking old dudes in entertainment who are fucking creeps, and it's like that just happens because you just are untethered from real life. And so, yeah, it's a thing of: What kind of person do I want to be? I've been very lucky in my career. I've had all these opportunities, but if you just chase that, I've done the math and I don't like where that goes. But I'm also not going to have the normal life that my brother has. So it's like, how can I split the difference in a way that feels authentic to me, where I can stay just authentic to who I want to be?Do you feel like you’ve figured that out?No. Fuck no. Listen, come back in a year. I'm giving myself a year to figure it out, or then I'm completely just being like, alright, fuck it—I'll just be a Hollywood scumbag.Sign up for Manual to receive useful advice on style, health, and more, five days a week.Zach Baron is GQ’s Senior Special Projects Editor. Since joining the magazine in 2013, he has written dozens of cover stories about people from all over culture — actors (Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Robert Pattinson), musicians (Pharrell, Kanye West, Justin Bieber), athletes (Kevin Durant, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Conor McGregor), and other ... Read More