Corey Stoll Punches Out in Fall's Freshest Pinstripes 

Corey Stoll Punches Out in Fall's Freshest Pinstripes

They used to be called banker stripes, but now that they're being worn outside the office—and even migrating off suits onto vests and sweatpants—that term sounds like ancient history. Here, show-stealing actor Corey Stoll wears a new generation of pinstripes for the freelance era

Corey Stoll can disappear into a look. Scanning a vending machine in a blazer and a slouchy T-shirt, he's barely recognizable as the hardscrabble, coke-addicted congressman in

or the uptight Paul Altman in this fall's preposterously star-filled

Stoll in a cardigan versus Stoll in a waistcoat versus Stoll in his career-defining moment, nude and cripplingly drunk in a bathtub contemplating suicide—those are three very different Stolls. He made it out of that bathtub but didn't last long. His kill-off in season one at the hands of Kevin Spacey—"It was a great way to die," Stoll says—was a shock but catapulted his career and freed him to take all the projects he'd failed to land in his twenties.

His ascendance seems less like a random breakout than a hard-earned payoff, the type of realistic path—graduate school, a gig building theater sets,

—you might prepare a young actor to follow. "I was at Oberlin this past weekend, and I did a poor man's

" he says. "I tried to be as honest as possible." Here Stoll dwells for a second on the worn-out advice that established actors tend to give young ones: Work hard. Make your own luck. He seems not quite acclimated to the fact that he's just transitioned from the advice-seeking camp to the one doling it out. "Everybody knows what the advice is, but also everyone knows it's an impossible career," he says finally. Which is true, until you climb into a bathtub and come to terms with dying. Then it looks a lot less impossible.—Mark Byrne

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