With Indie Comedy ‘Let’s Start a Cult,’ Stavros Halkias Is Ready for His Movie Star Moment
In an age where raunchy, ridiculous comedies are getting harder and harder to come by, stand-up comic and podcaster Stavros Halkias is willing to do whatever he has to become the next Will Ferrell, Danny McBride, or Chris Farley. For years, his crowd work was a staple of TikTok, endearing audiences with his crude, blunt sense of observational humor that extends to his involvement in the former podcast “Cum Town,” as well as his current show, “Stavvy’s World.” Now trying to both leverage and expand on this fan base he’s spent years cultivating, Halkias has placed another bet on himself by co-writing and starring in the indie screwball comedy “Let’s Start a Cult.”
The film was conceived alongside co-star Wes Haney and director Ben Kitnick, who brought the idea to Halkias, then later developed the script as well as a short version with him prior to the making of the feature. Honoring the lovable idiots who came before him like “Billy Madison” and “Kenny Powers,” Halkias plays Chip, a child-like ignoramus who has so offended the cult of which he’s a member, they trick him into missing the group suicide they planned on sharing together. However, when Chip discovers the leader of the cult (Haney) managed to survive the poisoning, he’s given the chance to build a new group of followers, this time with people who might finally love and appreciate him or, at the very least, are as messed up as he is. It’s the type of fun, silly concept that, at one point in time, might’ve garnered the attention of a big studio, especially with Halkias bringing both his talent and his audience to the project. But rather than try to sell it and likely spend years developing it, the comedian and his collaborators chose to act immediately by going the independent route, working off a small budget from Dark Sky Films, an outfit mostly known for working in horror.
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“When I was younger, I was really precious about my material. I thought I was like a real artist,” Halkias said in a recent interview with IndieWire. “Meanwhile, you know, I’m telling dick jokes at shitty bars. But in my head, I was like, ‘Nah, these are the most special dick jokes. I can’t let these out till they’re perfect.’ And I think what really changed my life and my career was just — put yourself out there, put your material out there. If your special is not ready, just do it. Nothing is ever ready like you think it’s gonna be.”
Cults have been a popular topic of conversation as of late, with documentaries like “Wild Wild Country” and “The Vow” offering hours of in depth study on how people become wrapped up in these groups, often to the detriment of their own emotional, physical, and financial well-being. While many pieces have dealt with the subject in a serious fashion, what attracted Halkias was getting to point out how foolish, yet self-assured all these cultists must be.
“I like to think of myself as like a disciple of the confident idiot school of comedy. Like Will Ferrell movies, ‘Billy Madison,’ ‘Foot Fist Way,’ Kenny Powers, all that shit, and with cults, you get that distilled, cause to buy in, you have to be so dumb and so confident,” said Halkias. “You have to tell your family to fuck off, sell all your possessions, some guy is God as far as you’re concerned. So you’re automatically dumb and you’re so confident you’ve changed your entire life. It was such a fertile ground.”
In making the film on an independent budget, certain sacrifices did have to be made, especially once Dark Sky realized the feature wouldn’t take place in one location as the short film had. Halkias had never even written a screenplay before and now he had to do so while also considering the financial constraints they were working under. Of the same token, acting was never a pursuit he had in mind when he started stand-up and adapting his skills to this task proved more challenging than he anticipated.
“I don’t know shit about acting,” Halkias said. “I went to the Baltimore School for the Arts, like sixth grade after school program. That’s my total acting training and quickly you realize it, especially when you’re making an indie comedy and you’ve just gotta get it done. It’s like you have three shots at it. You wrote these words down, get them done. Especially when we were kind of up against it.”
Halkias went on to explain how the goal of stand up was “just to get a laugh,” while the goal of acting is less about causing a reaction than embracing what the character is going through. At the same time, in communicating the highs and lows of Chip’s experience for the camera, he was able to discover new ways of bringing out humor that he may not have explored had he just stuck to being a solo act.
“There’s different ways to get a laugh and there’s things you can do with your face and there’s things you can do with your body. I’m used to my own timing, but there’s playing off of somebody else’s timing and that was all super fun,” Halkias told IndieWire. “It makes you a better comedian because I love stand up, but it is a limited art form. There’s so many more ways to express yourself in a movie and that was fucking awesome. That was so fun to just figure out other ways to be funny.”
When asked why he, Kitnick, and Haney chose to make the film themselves rather than involve a studio, Halkias just laughed and exclaimed, “They’re not making fucking shit!”
Referencing fellow comedian and friend Shane Gillis’ self-financed series, “Tires,” which Netflix acquired and just recently produced a second season of, Halkias, who co-stars on show, pointed out how even though Gillis is “selling out arenas,” he still had to pay for the first season himself just to get it made. Seeing Gillis’ experience just pushed Halkias further towards making “Let’s Start a Cult” independently, as, at the very least, he knew he wouldn’t have to wait for someone else’s approval.
“I do love comedy movies. They’re not making them and we had an opportunity to make it and to be honest with you, I had an opportunity to star in a movie with no acting background,” said Halkias. “If that means, we make it in a way where there’s no trailers and I’m napping under a tree, fine. If that means we’re eating Taco Bell sometimes instead of getting catered meals, who gives a fuck? Let’s just make a movie that’s funny and dumb.”
Halkias hopes his next project gets “a little bit more money,” but it’s safe to say he’s already entered the big leagues, having just wrapped a role in an upcoming project from an A-list director that features an Academy Award-winning actress. The opportunity was totally unexpected for the comedian, who had little acting experience outside of shorts and who felt like this kind of chance was still far off in his career.
“What’s crazy is when I started [‘Let’s Start a Cult’], what I wanted, maybe someday like five, 10 years down the line when I get better at acting, was what just happened,” Halkias said of getting cast in the upcoming feature.
At first, he was unsure whether he had the physical and mental space to take on another project, especially after a year that had seen him finish a feature film, a recorded stand-up special for Netflix, a second season of “Tires,” all while balancing new episodes of his podcast “Stavvy’s World.” But it was his experience on “Let’s Start a Cult,” as well as the make-it-happen mentality he established while building his career that pushed him to take the risk.
“I did four projects that could have all been their own thing for a year. So I was done and I was like, ‘I’m taking four months off unless’ — I made a list of like literally five people — ‘unless these five people want to do something with me, I am saying no.’ And I turned down some cool shit too,” said Halkias. “Then I got an opportunity to be in kind of a dream project with an A-list director I fucking love and actors that I have such respect for, have been in so many incredible projects from comedy to serious shit, and it was just surreal dude. It truly was a surreal experience and I just wanted to do a good ass job. I think the ethos of just make shit actually did help me out because if I was more precious, I would have been like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ I would have been scared.”
Compared to how he carries “Let’s Start a Cult,” Halkias doesn’t consider his role in this film that huge, but says it did make him hopeful about his future in this business and continuing to explore a craft he was initially unsure he’d excel at. He told IndieWire, “I’m a little excited to kind of get another crack at a — knock on wood — big ass project where I get to just pop in and do a little something which by the way, that’s all I want. I love being the guy that pops in.”
Whether he’s just popping in or part of every scene, one thing is for certain: Stavvy is just getting started.
“Let’s Start a Cult” from Dark Sky Films is now in select theaters.
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