Sebastian Stan And Lily James Were Very Committed To Roles In 'Pam & Tommy'

Sebastian Stanand Lily James took method acting to a whole new level as they rarely broke their character while on set.

Ahead of the premiere of the Hulu series, "Pam And Tommy," the duo were interviewed by Jimmy Kimmel at "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" In the interview, James disclosed that she and Stan remained in their character while they made the series.

"It's true," Stan confirmed. "I texted Lily early on; I said, 'Listen, I'm scared sh--less, and I'm gonna need to hold your hand, and if you want to hold mine, we're here, we're in this together.'"

He added, "And then I didn't see her outside of Pamela until the end of the shoot."

The pair also talked about how they were terrified to play such iconic individuals.

"I think we were both just terrified to play these characters," Stan replied. "They're real-life people. I don't have tattoos on my body. I think we both would just, on repeat, listen to their voices and their interviews. And — I know we both did this — we would scream into pillows in between the scenes because I was trying to get my voice raspy to sound like him, and you were doing that too. So I was like, 'You're screaming into a pillow as well?!'"

Although embodying the couple wasn't a walk in the park, Stan and James never saw their leaked tape before signing on to the project. Even James called their sex tape leak "a crime against them."

"The tape was made as a private, private tape between two people in love," she added. "And it's not a sex tape.' Pam has always talked about it in that way. So it was just such a massive violation of their privacy."

For Stan, he heard of the news as a teen but never looked it up.

"I had heard about it, and, you know, you hear things, and you don't know the story, right?" Sebastian said.

He added, "So just to be able to kind of go back and go, 'Hey, wait a minute, they had nothing to do with this thing,' like, 'This is how this thing was stolen, this is how it was taken,'—and it was wild enough to read and know about—I think that they deserved that being retold."

He admitted that he had to reach out to Tommy Lee at a point. "They're real people," he mentioned. "It's a real person. Of course, at some point, you want to raise your hand and go, 'Hey, this is my name. Nice to meet you. I don't know what you think about it, but I guess I'll play you in this thing.' It feels like it's a common decent thing to do."

The actress formerly even used Pamela's voice to facetime her family in the UK. "I would FaceTime them as Pamela and talk to them as Pamela," she said. "But then I think the other day, my brother came around for lunch when I was at home in England. I had a picture of Pamela, a Playboy picture of her. She looks incredible.

My little brother came and went, 'No, Lily! God, no.' And I was, 'No, no, it's not me. It's Pamela!' And I'm worried that I ruined Pamela Anderson for him, which would be such a tragedy!"

The movie follows the whirlwind experience between Tommy Lee and actor-model Pamela Anderson– and their infamous sex tape leak.

"They met and were married within four days. On the surface, that seems very reckless," says Gillespie, director of the limited Hulu series. "But it was vital for us to understand the complexities of the people involved and the motivations."

Unlike documentaries of past happenings, the events depicted in the series were recent enough. This was a step back in getting the audience on board.

Thankfully, the director assigned the roles to Stan and James. They had a convincing depiction and were indistinguishable from their iconic counterparts.

"It's always such a tricky thing when you're playing a real person, and particularly an iconic person that the public is very familiar with because they tend to know their mannerisms and their inflections," explained Gillespie. "Lily and Sebastian did so much of their work, really getting the cadence and their speech patterns and body language down."

He also added that although the bulk of capturing a famous person comes from an external motivation, the performance still needs from an internal place.

"There's a point at which they felt good about it when they just had to let that go and embody the spirit of what we were trying to do in a scene as those characters," he said of the co-stars, "and not just be doing an impersonation."