Here's a way to do it without turning it into a string first (based on some rudimentary benchmarking, this is about twice as fast as stringifying n first):
>>> n = 43365644
>>> [(n//(10**i))%10 for i in range(math.ceil(math.log(n, 10))-1, -1, -1)]
[4, 3, 3, 6, 5, 6, 4, 4]
