Late actor Paul Reubens, known for portraying the character Pee-wee Herman, came out as gay in his posthumous HBO documentary.
The two-part HBO special, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival Thursday night, features Reubens’ final interviews before he died of cancer in July 2023 at age 70.
Sitting down with director Matt Wolf for 40 hours worth of interviews, Reubens revealed that he was “secretive about [his] sexuality even to [his] friends.”
“[It was] self-hatred or self-preservation,” he said. “I was conflicted about sexuality. But fame was way more complicated.”
Despite never having come out of the closet while he was alive, he had a boyfriend named Guy before his Hollywood career skyrocketed.
When Reubens’ Pee-wee Herman character started gaining traction, he decided to keep his sexual orientation private.
“I was out of the closet, and then I went back in the closet,” he said in the doc. “I wasn’t pursuing the Paul Reubens career, I was pursuing the Pee-wee Herman career.”
The “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday” star recalled visiting Guy in the hospital when he was dying of AIDS.
“To talk about seeing someone at death’s door. He probably died a couple hours after that,” Reubens shared.
The actor drew inspiration from Guy, like when he would say, “Mmmm! Buttery!” in a Yoda-like tone.
“You can see where that led me,” Reubens said, referring to Pee-wee’s famous one-liner, “Mmmm! Chocolatey!”
Reubens admitted that he had “many, many secret relationships” but that his career always came before his love life.
The improv star “hid behind an alter-ego” and shared that he never told anyone that he was a “huge weed head” or that he was gay.
Reubens was often spotted looking cozy with actress Debi Mazar, who asserted in the doc that he was truly her boyfriend.
“I know people will say, ‘He was gay!’ So what?” Mazer said.
The pressures of concealing Reubens’ true self resulted in a scandal that unraveled his entire career.
In 1991, he was arrested at an adult movie theater and charged with indecent exposure — to which he pleaded no contest.
“I kept who I was a secret for a very long time,” Reubens said. “That really backfired when I got arrested. People had never seen a photo of me other than Pee-wee Herman. And all of a sudden, I had a Charlie Manson mugshot.”
“I lost control of my anonymity. It was devastating.”
To mitigate the backlash, his crisis PR team staged a paparazzi photo of Reubens on a date with a woman at a Los Angeles restaurant. He also appeared as Pee-wee at the 1991 MTV Music Awards and was a guest on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”
Still, the damage was done and Reubens said he never fully recovered from the incident.
“It’s shocking what horrible, awful stuff people think about me,” Reubens said. “It’s still a significant footnote… 30 years later I still feel the effects all the time.”
Nearly a decade after his first arrest, Reubens made headlines again when his home was raided and he was charged with possessing images that were believed to be child pornography.
Reubens, an avid collector of rare memorabilia, argued that the photos were “vintage erotica” that even existed in college libraries. The charges were eventually dropped in 2004 and he pleaded guilty to a lesser obscenity charge.
Mazer, as well as David Arquette and his then-wife Courteney Cox, all stood by Reubens’ side throughout the fallout.
He eventually had a small comeback, starring in “The Pee-wee Herman Show” on Broadway in 2010 and making the 2016 film “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday,” among other smaller acting and voice roles.
Reubens wanted to make the documentary so he could share the truth about his legacy.
“More than anything, the reason I wanted to make a documentary was for people to see who I really am, and how painful and dreadful it was to be labeled something I wasn’t,” he said. “To be labeled a pariah; to have people be scared of you, or untrusting.”
While the intention was to tell his whole story, text messages show that Reubens stopped replying to Wolf and other movie staffers when he was asked about the obscenity.
He never sat for another interview, but as his health started waning, Reubens decided to send a final audio message to the director – never revealing that he was dying of cancer.
“My whole career, everything I did and wrote, was based in love,” he said in his final note.