“This is such a dumb thing to say,” Paul Reubens, creator of beloved children’s character Pee-wee Herman, admits in his modern documentary, Pee-wee a
“This is such a dumb thing to say,” Paul Reubens, creator of beloved children’s character Pee-wee Herman, admits in his modern documentary, Pee-wee as Himself. “But death is so final that to be able to get your message in at the last minute, or at some point, is incredible.”
What Reubens didn’t tell filmmaker Matt Wolf was that his time was, indeed, running out. Reubens and Wolf made the doc, which airs on HBO and Max on May 23, while Reubens was secretly fighting a six-year battle with cancer. He died on July 30, 2023, at age 70—only a week before his final scheduled interview for the film.
The tension between his flamboyantly public career and his deeply private personal life is at the center of the documentary, which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. Wolf shaved down 40 hours of interview footage with Reubens and 1,000 hours of archival material to examine how Reubens’s gray-suited, red-bowtied, strangely voiced Pee-wee Herman went from a subversive character born in the Groundlings improv troupe to a mainstream icon of film (Pee-wee’s Big Adventure) and TV (Pee-wee’s Playhouse). In the film, Reubens also officially comes out as a gay man—then jokingly retracts the statement. “You can’t depend on anything I’m saying, all this gay stuff,” Reubens says, looking directly into the camera. “I was sleep-deprived. I didn’t have food. If I said I was gay, I know I could leave earlier,” he adds, a knowing twinkle in his eye.
“Paul told me from the onset that he wanted to come out in a documentary, but he was very ambivalent and anxious about me being a gay filmmaker, as a point of connection and a point of friction,” Wolf told Paper magazine. “I think he was concerned I might overly focus on his sexuality or try to depict him as a gay icon, which was not how he saw himself. It was a dance between us.”
Reubens does speak candidly in the doc about coming out of the closet, then going back into it at the height of his fame—as well as the late-in-life legal battles that threatened his livelihood as Pee-wee. Ahead, a look at the biggest revelations from Pee-wee as Himself.
Paul Reubens was openly gay and dressed in drag as a teenage man.
Growing up in Sarasota, Florida, Reubens (born Paul Rubenfeld) explored his gender expression. For Halloween one year, he dressed as a princess alongside his sister Abby Rubenfeld, who went as a lumberjack. “He was so uncomfortable being gay, and I never was,” she says in the documentary.
Although Reubens introduced at least one woman to his parents as his girlfriend, when he eventually came out as a gay man, “both my parents were extremely supportive immediately,” he says in the film. “My father did write me an incredible letter and said, ‘Son, if you are homosexual, I want you to know that I hope you’re gonna be the greatest homosexual you can be.’”
COMMENTS