This interview is part of the State of the American Male in 2025, a special report on masculinity. Read more about the issue from GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch here and read the results of GQ’s 2025 State of Masculinity survey here.
Stavros Halkias shows up at a Greek restaurant in Astoria, Queens with a massive suitcase in tow. I ask him if he’s headed straight to the airport. No, he says – he’s headed to the photoshoot for this story. “When you’re a bigger guy, turns out they make you bring your own clothes,” he says. What he doesn’t say is that we both know he’s going to end up taking them off anyway.
That’s Halkias: comfortable in his own skin. Assured in his masculinity. Playing to type – the funny fat guy – but subverting it at every opportunity by being the sexiest, horniest, and somehow most respectful pervert at the comedy show. Halkias got famous as one third of Cum Town, a comedy podcast that mashed anti-PC shock humor with surprisingly egalitarian politics, giving a generation of disaffected, economically depressed young men a constant stream of shit-talk tempered with leftist motifs. For years, men ate it up, so much so that hosts Halkias, Adam Friedland, and Nick Mullen shot to individual stardom.
“It’s insane how good my life has gotten,” Halkias tells me at one point, seeming shocked. After the podcast ended in 2022, he wrote and starred in 2024’s Let’s Start a Cult and booked a starring role in the Shane Gillis-helmed Netflix series Tires. He followed that up with a role in Yorgos Lanthimos’s upcoming Begonia, and, a few days after we talked, was announced in a supporting role for A24’s in-production film about the life of a young Anthony Bourdain.
But we don’t get to that right away. We spend the first 20 minutes of the interview trading Greek bona-fides. I have none, but my wife is Greek-American, and Halkias, who was raised by Greek immigrants in Baltimore, knows all about her Florida hometown due to its famous all-Greek sponge docks. A woman walking down the street past our sidewalk table looks at us as though she’s just seen, say, Harry Styles: a double take, huge smile, tentative approach to say hello.
“My fiance’s a huge fan of you,” she says. “We’re literally getting married Sunday.”
“Ok COOL,” Stavvy says, grinning.
“He’s going to freak out, can we take a picture?”
That’s life, nowadays, for Halkias, the uncle-king of Astoria. While becoming more recognizable, he’s no less approachable, thanks in part to his funny and intimate solo podcast, Stavvy’s World. Produced by his childhood friend Eldis Sula, it includes a call-in portion in which Halkias offers advice about how his listeners can, in his words, not be incels — some of which he shared with GQ.
What does being a man mean to you?
I mean, being a man in particular, I don’t think about it that much. I think that’s one of the advantages of being a white guy. You’re the default in society, unfortunately. You don’t ever consider your identity because everything is shaped towards your identity from the time you’re younger. I think that’s also why people are mad about some of that being under scrutiny.
