Stavros Halkias on How Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell Inspired ‘Let’s Start a Cult’

The Big Picture

• Stavros Halkias wanted to make a nostalgic “junk food” comedy with
  Let’s Start a Cult.
• The movie embraces a raucous, over-the-top comedy style while including surprisingly heartfelt moments.
• Casting improv legends, pro wrestlers, and real newscasters elevates the film’s eclectic ensemble.

Cult documentaries are all the rage these days. From Wild Wild Country to Heaven’s Gate to the plethora of content about NXIVM, people can’t stop peeking into these stranger-than-fiction worlds. But no matter how many cult shows and films you’ve watched, I can all but guarantee you’ve never seen one quite like Let’s Start a Cult, a movie that puts a classic comedy spin on things by exploring the question, “What if there was a guy who was so annoying that not even a cult wanted him?”

Said guy is played by Stavros Halkias, who also co-wrote the film with co-star Wes Haney and director Ben Kitnick. An established stand-up comedian, Halkias is no stranger to outlandish humor, bringing his signature style to his Netflix special Fat Rascal, sitcom Tires (which can also be found on the platform), and formerly the podcast Cum Town. He’s joined by an ensemble that includes everyone from professional wrestlers to real-life newscasters to improv pros, making for one of the most eclectic, off-the-walls films of the year — and very likely the most hilarious movie about a suicide cult you’ll ever see in your life.

Collider got the chance to speak with Halkias about creating a nostalgic-feeling comedy that’s both stupid and heartfelt, assembling the top-tier cast, that bonkers sex scene, and more.

Stavros Halkias Wanted to Make a Nostalgic “Junk Food” Movie With ‘Let’s Start a Cult’

COLLIDER: This movie feels very nostalgic — they don’t really make a lot of comedies like this anymore. Can you talk a little bit about wanting to create something with this specific raunchy almost absurdist tone that’s rarer in movies nowadays?

STAVROS HALKIAS: Yeah, totally. The older I get, the more I understand why there’s a wave of nostalgia for every generation like 30 years later because I grew up watching Billy Madison and Will Ferrell movies — that lineage where, theoretically, everything is real, but these characters are so ridiculous that if they exist in a real reality, they’re crazy outliers to how human beings actually behave. I really love those comics, and it really comes down to that. My favorite characters are really dumb, confident people. You can trace that from Sandler — and even before that — all the way through Danny McBride. That’s where I kind of came in, and I like to play a version of that. That’s my favorite thing to explore right now — my spin on that dumbass character.

It comes down to the old saying of “make the movie you wish you could see.” I was going into college when Superbad came out, so I was like the perfect age for that, and I really rode with all those Apatow films — that whole generation. Since then, comedy has really turned to the internet in a weird way where everything is there. A lot of people are making great stuff on their own and have taken control of being able to produce stuff on their YouTube channels. There was a point where I even thought, “I just put a stand-up special on my YouTube channel — why not put a feature on there?” These were real thoughts that I was having. But I do still think there is something nostalgic about the movies. There’s something that feels like it’s a different experience when you see it in front of a crowd with people. That kind of movie is nostalgic, and even going to the movies at this point feels nostalgic. That’s why we’re trying so hard to get it in theaters — I think there’s something special about that communal experience.

I absolutely agree. I loved how you were talking during the premiere Q&A about the theatrical experience being important and also wanting to edit it down to under 90 minutes. Can you explain a little bit why that’s important? I’m sick of the three-hour films.

Too long. Too fucking long. No, 100%. That is something that I found even with some of my recent favorite comedies — they got kind of crazy in length. Maybe that’s because there was so much improvisation, and you have so many funny people, and you don’t want to cut it down. We had to cut stuff that we loved because things just take a little longer than you think.

I have a very, very specific view of comedy. I’ve sort of dedicated my whole life to stand-up. I don’t think I’m a philosopher. I don’t think what I have to say is important. I think you should come to my show, and you should laugh for one hour, and even if you don’t agree with me, you should be like, “That was crazy. It’s funny to see how that dumbass views the world. I had a good time.” I don’t know as much about movies — stand-up I’ve done pretty much my whole adult life — but I’m pretty much coming at this as a moviegoer. I don’t want my comedies to be a commitment — I want them to be fun. It is eating junk food. You’re not gonna get smarter looking at this movie. You’re not gonna learn any lessons. You’re not gonna reflect on the human condition. You are going to see hopefully 90 jokes in 89 minutes, and you’re just gonna have a fun time. There are a couple of big moments that are really over the top and stupid, and you’re gonna laugh about those with your friends.

It’s a good movie for when you’re 14, and it’s maybe a little too much for you, you know what I mean? I remember being 12 and seeing shit I wasn’t exactly ready for, but it wasn’t so bad that it traumatized me. We’re in that sweet spot. So that’s it. It was very important to us to get it under 90. We wanted to get around 90, and we got it to 89, and that was a huge win. There are moments where we’re missing some crucial plot stuff, but it’s not funny, so who gives a fuck? It’s not Citizen Kane. It’s not Tenet. If we miss a plot point, you’re gonna be able to figure out what happened, so let’s just prioritize the joke. We’re just making a really fun, digestible thing. I’ve been there where I’m scrolling, and I see something, and it looks like a fun movie, and it’s 2 hours and 40 fucking minutes. And it’s like I had to start my plan to watch a movie at 7 p.m. to be able to eat dinner and brush my teeth. So 89 minutes? You’re in, you’re out, and you laughed a bunch of times, hopefully — that’s the goal.

I think you definitely succeeded on that front. I know this is looking ahead a little bit, but do you have plans to release some of those deleted scenes and bloopers and things on physical media? I feel like that’s also something that’s going away.

Totally. I think what we did was kind of ambitious. It’s a really low budget in terms of what movies cost — we made it for well under a million bucks — so we did it on a really tight schedule, and I wish there were more bloopers because that’s also one of my favorite memories. Watching the bloopers and the deleted scenes and the director’s commentary? Maybe we’ll do that, though. Maybe we’ll put together a commentary. Because I still remember watching the Anchorman commentary, The 40-Year-Old Virgin commentary. Being in high school, those really stuck with me.

It’s a little looking ahead, but it’s also a great learning experience because I’m not an actor. I’m not a serious artist. I love movies, and I do like serious movies, but that’s not what I’m here for, you know what I mean? That’s not my goal. Maybe if you want to make me a guy in a diner while the two main characters are having a conversation, that’s as much as I can do. I would love to be in a PTA movie where I’m just drinking coffee while two actual good actors are going back and forth. In terms of movies I want to make, I want to keep making these kinds of things and working with my friends. This was so fun to write with Ben and Wes. We had made a stupid little short and that was super fun and improvised, and from that, for a whole movie to come out of it, was such a great experience to share with my friends. All I wanna do is make those types of movies and have a good time.

Yeah, the next one, we gotta have more bloopers. We gotta have time to fuck around a little more because we had some great improvisers on there. Like Eric [Rahill] is so funny and everything — we snuck a couple of his improvised lines into the movie — but it would have been so fun to be able to let Eric and Katy [Fullan], who are both great improvisers, go even more. Next time. At the end of the day, if somebody lets you make a movie, you gotta take that chance because who knows if you’ll ever get it again.

Stavros Halkias on Casting Improv Legends and Real Newscasters for ‘Let’s Start a Cult’

You called some people out by name, but I am curious who you would say was the hardest to be in a scene with and not break around because I don’t know what you got through this.

I think Eric was probably the hardest not to break around because he just nails it. He’s so good. We wrote a lot of the characters with our friends in mind. Wes, in particular, was really good at tapping into other people’s voices. He and I had a scene where it’s sort of a tense moment, and he’s trying to console me, and I’m not having any of it. When he throws something different at you, it’s hard to keep a straight face. When Joe Pera came on for one day, and his vibe, his energy, and the way the scene was written, it was really hard to keep it together. Everybody was really funny, and we cast a lot of improvisers and stand-up comedians — there were so many people who could have even written the movie. There are a lot of people who were in it who could’ve written it, too. We were just really lucky.

I want to ask about a couple of specific characters. I was really delighted to see Edy Modica, who I loved in Jury Duty . How did she come about?

The original cult is another great example — those people are all so funny, and we shot way more with them. It gets back to the fact that it’s gotta be tight — we can’t be indulgent. We just have to set up this world. We all knew Edy, and we were literally watching Jury Duty, and we were like, “Let’s get Edy.” We wanted to be able to buy these people as cult members, and we tried to cast as many people who were our friends as we possibly could. But even Leslie [Zang], who we didn’t know, who we cast from the Chicago area, was great, too. Literally, the way we cast this was, “Name every funny person you know and ask them to be in the movie.” And we got a lot of them!

I wanted to also ask about the Georgeanne Jennings stuff because that killed me — I found it really hilarious. Can you tell me about developing that character and getting her? I feel like that just takes the whole thing to the next level at the end.

I’m really happy with how the end turned out. We just wanted the movie to feel like it had a real end. Again, it didn’t have to make sense in the real world, but we wanted to have a real resolution to really feel like something happened. Jokes are important, but we also wanted you to feel like you went to a movie. A dumb movie, a stupid movie, but still a movie — not just a bunch of comedians fucking around.

Georgeanne was really fun because cult documentaries are so in the culture and zeitgeist — there are so many shows about them — so we wanted to tap into that a little bit. Ultimately, none of us are cult obsessives — we just thought it was a very fun premise. Ben, our director, came up with the basic premise of, “What if one guy was so annoying everybody killed themselves without him?” And that was it. It was almost like when you get a suggestion at an improv scene and run with it, and we just made a movie out of it. It was sort of backward. We were like, “What is funny about cults? You get very unconventional people, and you get to really heighten it because these are the kinds of people who join cults.” But also, there are a lot of shows about them, and we just thought it would be funny to establish her a little bit and then kind of bring her out of nowhere and have people with different energies interact.

We went out to a lot of established comedy people, and we ended up going with Jeanne Sparrow. She legit worked in news, and she had gotten into acting a little bit, but she was the real deal. She had a great sense of humor and was so fun to work with. She got it completely, and I think she did bring an element of a real newscaster. It would have been cool to have an established comedy legend do it, but they would have taken you out of it a little bit. In hindsight, I think we got so lucky because she crushed it. She felt like a real interviewer. Our scenes, both with me and her scenes with Wes, are such a perfect energy.

Even within the comedians, we wanted to get creative with our casting. For the ice cream man, we had an actor who was so awesome. He was talking about how he got his SAG card so long ago. He was the sweetest guy on earth. We had written that part for a kid, but we wanted this to be an interesting film. We wanted fun stuff to happen. We got really lucky with all our casting. Sarafina, who played Dorota — that’s another one. We went for more comedy people, but she was so good, and it worked out so well. She was so game for a lot of wild scenes that maybe we couldn’t have gotten because she’s a really good actor who was so game and didn’t come straight from the comedy world. We got very lucky. We got so lucky with the cast, from the comedians to the people we didn’t know. It was awesome.

Stavros Halkias Breaks Down ‘Let’s Start a Cult’s Wild Sex Scene and Lore

Speaking of her, I do have to ask about that wild sex scene. Can you tell me about filming that? That got crazy laughs in the theater.

There’s a handful of scenes that you just like, “This is going to fucking work.” It’s what you want to make a movie for. You can’t get a laugh like that in any other context. I can’t do that in stand-up, you know what I mean? You have to use every part of yourself, pardon the pun. You have to be willing to do whatever to get a laugh. And that’s what I really love about movies. I love stand-up, but it’s kind of limiting. It’s all set up, punchline. Movies are visuals, timing, editing, sound, all that stuff. I knew we had to have a wild sex scene because you might not get a chance to make another movie, and I’m not gonna save anything for the next one. We’re gonna make the absolute best movie we can with our resources right now. I’m not holding anything back, and that’s kind of how I felt. I was like, “We have to do a fucking insane sex scene.”

We tried to follow the conventions of plot. Because that’s a big moment, plotwise, in a weird way. We wanted the reason the movie turns to be a ridiculous scene. We didn’t want to make it purely gratuitous, and I think it’s even funnier to use an over-the-top sex scene. Honestly, the movie does not make any sense whatsoever if there isn’t this way over-the-top sex scene in it. It was a key to the plot. So I think it’s funnier to make it like a load-bearing nude scene.

I want to talk about the beliefs of the cult because they’re obviously ridiculous but also so complex, and you deliver them so believably. How was the lore developed of transcending and all of that?

That was another thing we never wanted to play purely for laughs. That’s another thing with comedy — I think it’s an adage I’ve heard other people say, who knows who it’s attributed to, but it’s, “The people in a comedy can’t know they’re in a comedy.” The people in a cult movie about how dumb their cult is can’t know how stupid it sounds. We wanted to play everything straight, and we wanted to give you a vague sense of it. Obviously, it’s a suicide cult, but everything else is choose your own adventure. What does it all mean? I’m almost curious to go back and see what we can piece together because it is nonsense — we just wanted to sound serious. None of it means anything, but in the moment, it kind of makes sense. So, who knows? Hopefully, it takes off, and someone’s doing a four-hour lore video YouTube essay someday. That’s my goal.

I really do need that. We’ve talked a lot about how this movie is so perfectly cast, and I wouldn’t change anyone in the ensemble, but I want to know, if you could play another character, who would you most like to play?

That’s interesting. I mean, William would obviously be interesting. Getting to be the villain would be really fun. If it’s a smaller character, I mean, you want to talk about casting? We got Phil Brooks — CM Punk. We got a huge wrestler who’s an incredible performer, and he was a great presence. His character is kind of a creep — a weird RV sex pervert. That would have been fun to play in terms of smaller roles. I think I would have really liked that.

And it’s hard, though, because everyone’s perfect for the role. Tyler, Eric’s character, would be really fun, but there’s no one on earth who could play that character better than Eric. Truly. He’s so good, and it’s so specific to him that I couldn’t even tell you exactly what it is. He’s so talented and so good at channeling that mix of desperation and barely hidden, constant pain. He’s so good at the character he developed, and we were, again, so lucky to have him. But yeah, maybe the weird RV sex creep would be fun and, as an acting challenge, being William would be fun. I could play the leader of a cult, too. In fact, I did do an indie movie a while ago where I just happened to play one. So something about me says cult to people. But I think I could handle that, too.

Stavros Halkias on ‘Let’s Start a Cult’s Surprising Heart

I love the typecast. What a unique one. My last question is: my favorite comedies are the ones that are really raunchy and ridiculous but ultimately do have heart, and this fits in some weird way. I’m curious if you can just talk about giving it this ending that is genuinely sweet in the most bizarre way.

What’s important to me is that I want to make comedy where there are no lessons, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have heart. I think, if you step back and think about it at the end, it’s basically…this is gonna sound so pretentious, but I’m Greek, so I only know like four books. But the Iliad is a story about Achilles’ anger — it’s not about the Trojan War. In some ways, our movie is not about a guy who’s so annoying that everybody kills themselves, so he has to start a new cult — it’s about a guy finding his family, as corny as that is.

The movie starts with Chip, and he’s clearly fled his biological family that’s not good to him to join this cult that treats him like shit, and the movie ends with him finding the people who treat him nicely. If you think for one second about it, it’s a completely dysfunctional family. If you fast-forward three years, nothing good is happening for these people. You could argue that Chip has become a monster himself and has learned the wrong lessons from everything. But it ends, within that moment, that he’s happy with his new pals, and he’s a success. I do think he becomes a worse person, weirdly, by the end of it. But that’s what’s funny.

If we make a sequel and really franchise this bad boy, there is more to do with this character. Fast-forward three years, and he’s now a successful self-help guru, but he treats everyone like shit, and he’s become the monster that he was rebelling against. But yes — it had heart. It doesn’t make sense. If you interrogate it, they are not even necessarily better off, these people. Who knows what’s going on with their lives? But emotionally, it does kind of hang together in a fun way. It’s all about feelings — it’s not about what you’re thinking.

I lied — I do want to ask one more question. Why gravel? I love that little detail.

I have to chalk that up to Wes. Wes is so good at some of these specifics, and that’s what was so fun about collaborating with him and Ben. We all had our little areas of expertise, and honestly, I loved it, too. Never in a million years would I have thought of it. There’s just a lot of, “Hey, what would be funny to say?” And we’d go back and forth, and he came up with that one. That’s how he came up with a lot of the names and the cult shit. It’s crazy. It’s weird. So yeah, shoutout to Wes for gravel. I don’t know why he came up with it, but he crushed it.

Let’s Start a Cult is in theaters now.

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