The Stavvy Method

Comedian Stavros Halkias went from edgelord royalty to keeping dudes from the dark side.

- By Jesse David Fox

STAVROS HALKIAS doesn't know why he, of all people, was cast as a cop in Yorgos Lanthimos's latest film, Bugonia, but he's aware that he offers some semiotic weight to its exploration of lost men who fall into dark online subcultures and conspiracy theories. Jesse Plemons plays Teddy, a young man whose life was ruined by capitalism and the pharmaceutical industry and who turns to YouTube with his questions; in real life, Halkias makes his living trying to offer such guys answers on his podcast, Stavvy's World. The comedian and former co-host of Cum Town—the popular but niche podcast on which fans could expect ironic racism, vulgarity, and the possibility of a host shitting himself—remembers being an angry "young male loser," so he now embraces his role as an incel counterprogrammer. Just don't call him "the Joe Rogan of the left."

Considering Bugonia's depiction of the internet and masculinity, do you think Yorgos cast you because of Cum Town and what you represent culturally?

We didn't talk about it, but it's fun to think about. Cum Town definitely represented, in the mid-2010s, something edgelord-y, troll-y. We would never consider ourselves anti-woke guys. It was never a political distinction for us, but we did hate fucking tattletale losers. Some of us more than others, but even I—whose role, as a straight man, was to rein us in—philosophically agreed that Shane Gillis should not have gotten fired from SNL.

I didn't think about that going into the movie, of course. I just thought it's a funny wrinkle to take a guy from the podcast sewers and elevate him to be in this movie. Teddy definitely listened to Cum Town. Maybe it wasn't his favorite thing, but it was in his rotation.

You've said you couldn't be 40 and still hosting Cum Town. Why?