Paul Reubens reveals the man behind his most well-known role, Pee-Wee Herman, in the new documentary series Pee-wee as Himself.
The two-part doc, directed by Matt Wolf and shown to Park City, Utah, and first shown to audiences on Jan. 23 at the Sundance Film Festival, includes on-camera interviews with Reubens about how he hid the fact that he was gay. The actor, who died from cancer in July 2023 at age 70, details one special relationship in particular.
During a party at his alma mater California Institute of the Arts, Reubens met a man named Guy. “I looked across the room and saw someone and fell in love instantly, just went, ‘That’s him, that’s the guy,’ ” Reubens recalls in his interview. “I certainly wasn’t planning on that.”
Guy, “a painter who was extremely artistic and extremely funny,” he says, moved with Reubens into a Los Angeles apartment where they began “playing house.” Many of Guy’s mannerisms, he adds, made their way into Reubens’ eventual Pee-wee Herman persona.
Paul Reubens in ‘Pee-wee as Himself’.
Dennis Keeley/HBO
“I lost my entire personality and myself in being with somebody else and part of a duo,” he recalls. “When we split up, I just made a conscious decision: ‘I’m not doing this again.’ I not only wasn’t going to be openly gay, but I wasn’t going to be in a relationship. I was going to advance my career because I could control that.”
After being “as out as you can be” as a young adult, says Reubens, “I went back in the closet. My career would have absolutely suffered if I was openly gay, so I went to great lengths for many, many years to keep it a secret.”
Years after splitting up but staying in touch, Reubens visited Guy in New York — when his ex was suffering from HIV/AIDS. “I knew he was sick,” he says. “I’m an actor, and he was somebody extremely important to me. And so I just tried really hard to be normal.”
At that point Guy was “at death’s door,” he says, tearing up on camera. “And he probably died within a couple hours of that time.”
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Losing friends to AIDS in the 1980s was “so intense,” Reubens adds. “It had real impact on me, like, it scared the heck out of me.”
Paul Reubens in ‘Pee-wee as Himself’.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
Pee-Wee as Himself, which will stream on HBO this spring, also covers the two scandals that affected Reubens after the success of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Although the actor participates in multiple on-camera interviews with Wolf, the documentary reveals that he stopped cooperating with the production, instead sending in audio on what turned out to be the day before he died.
“My whole career, everything I did and wrote was based in love and my desire to entertain and bring glee and creativity,” said Reubens in that message.
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