For more than 40 hours in 2023, Paul Reubens sat down for a series of one-on-one interviews, candidly recounting the highs and lows of his decades- spanning career. It wasn’t always easy— there were creative disagreements and real concerns that his story, particularly his arrest and misdemeanor charge for possessing materials depicting children in a sexual manner, might not be told the right way. Still, the actor, best known for his iconic alter ego Peewee Herman, chose to trust the process and committed to one final interview. Just one week before it was set to take place, Reubens died. “I had no reason to believe that Paul was contemplating his mortality,” says director Matt Wolf, who conducted the interviews unaware that Reubens had privately been battling lung cancer for six years. “I found out that Paul died on Instagram along with everybody else.”
Shortly after Reubens’s death, his assistant contacted Wolf and shared a recording the late star had made the day before he died on July 30, 2023, at age 70—his final words to the world. That recording, combined with the deeply personal interviews and archival footage, forms the emotional core of Pee-wee as Himself, a new two-part docuseries premiering May 23 on HBO. “I want to set the record straight,” Reubens, his voice weak and unsteady, said on the tape, which is played at the end of the film. “More than anything, the reason I wanted to make a documentary was to let people see who I really am and how painful and difficult it was to be labeled something that I wasn’t . . . a pedophile. I wanted somehow for people to understand that my whole career, everything I did and wrote, was based in love.”
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Pee-wee Herman was born from a harmonica and a noisy neighbor. “I had a little, tiny harmonica that said ‘pee-wee’ on it, and I knew this kid when I was little who was this crazy, really loud, nutty kid—and his last name was Herman,” Reubens, who was born Paul Rubenfeld in upstate New York and grew up in Sarasota, Fla., recalled in the docu series. “I thought ‘Pee-wee Herman’ sounds so weird that it sounds real. If you were making up a name, wouldn’t you make a better name than that?” Although the character started to take shape in 1978 during a scene night with the L.A. comedy troupe the Groundlings, Reubens said Pee-wee was the result of “a whole bunch” of disconnected moments finally coming together. While he had always loved performing, it was during his time at the California Institute of the Arts that Reubens began exploring alternative forms of creativity. “Performance art spoke to me . . . sitting in the dorm at 2 a.m. in drag, just hanging out,” he recalls. “Doing drag and ‘ passing’—I can draw a line from that to having an alter ego and being successful in having that character ‘pass’ as a real person.”
Though Reubens never publicly came out as gay, Wolf says it was something the comedian had always intended to do. “It was a decision he had made but one he was very ambivalent and anxious about,” Wolf explains. In the docuseries, Reubens detailed a “long-term, very serious” relationship right out of college with a man named Guy. They lived together and shared a cat, and Reubens credited the romance as a major source of inspiration for his comedy. “I looked across the room and saw someone and fell in love instantly,” he said. “I just went, ‘That’s him. That’s the guy.’ ” But becoming part of a couple meant giving up a part of himself, and when the relationship ended, Reubens made two decisions: to hide his sexuality and to forgo future romantic relationships. “I was as out as you can be, and then I went back in the closet,” he said. “My career absolutely would have suffered if I was openly gay. So I went to great lengths for many, many years to keep it a secret.”
During the 1980s and ’90s, Reubens achieved everything he had dreamed of. After unsuccessfully auditioning for Saturday Night Live—a spot he lost to Gilbert Gottfried, as they were “both the nerds in the group”—he began performing an act he called “The Pee-wee Herman Show” to sold-out crowds. Its success led to the hit 1985 film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and the Emmy-winning 1986-1990 children’s TV series Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Reubens became a cultural icon as Pee-wee Herman, even receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1988 under the name of his alter ego, a testament to both the character’s impact and Reubens’s determination to separate himself from his creation. “He was a private man who wanted people to believe Pee-wee was a real person,” Wolf says. “That was his performance art.” But even behind the safety of an alter ego, Reubens learned he couldn’t hide forever. “If I was conflicted about sexuality . . . fame was so much more complicated,” he reflected. “By the time I realized you trade in anonymity and privacy for success, the ink had dried on my pact with the devil.”
Reubens had big dreams as a child. With the support of his dad, who built a stage in their basement for performances, he honed his craft at the California Institute of the Arts, where he changed his name from Paul Rubenfeld to Paul Reubens. After graduating in 1973, he sent his picture “all over town” for roles and joined improv troupes. By the late ’70s an alter ego—and future star—was born. “I felt like I had some kind of little superpower, where I can move people,” he said. “I can cause a reaction.”
Reubens’s 1991 arrest for indecent exposure at an adult theater in Sarasota became what he would later call “a giant footnote” in his life. “It really backfired when I got arrested, and people had never seen a photo of me other than [as] Pee-wee Herman, and then all of a sudden I had a Charlie Manson mug shot,” he said. “It’s shocking what hideous, horrible, mean stuff people say and think about me.” After years spent retreating from the spotlight and rebuilding his brand, Reubens faced more controversy in 2001 when police raided his home while he was away filming Elton John’s “This Train Don’t Stop There Anymore” music video. Authorities seized his collection of vintage homoerotic art, including materials they categorized as child pornography. Reubens insisted it was not and eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser obscenity charge. The charges led to three years on the sexoffender registry, a consequence Reubens endured with quiet anguish. “When he would discuss his arrest with me, he said the overwhelming feeling was shock,” Wolf recalls. “From my point of view, it was incredibly unjust. So it was easy for me to lay it all out clearly so that people could collectively recognize he had been mistreated.”
Wolf related to Reubens in a new way after his death. In rewatching footage and rereading 1,500 pages of transcripts, he came to better understand Reubens—the significance of his words and the complexity of the man behind the character. “He was someone who was superintense and could be very uncompromising but also someone who had done a lot of work on himself and was always striving to do better, whether it was his work or his personal life,” Wolf says. “He had an enormous impact on the world, but in some ways had never been given full credit for his accomplishments.”
Even if he didn’t receive that credit, Reubens took great pride in staying true to himself through Pee-wee. “Nothing would stop me. Nothing would deter me. It would be pure in every way,” Reubens said of the character. “Part of why I feel so proud of it [is] I delivered that. I lived up to that not just for you but for myself.”
(MUG SHOT) KYPROS/GETTY IMAGE; BOTTOM, FROM LEFT: SETH POPPEL/YEARBOOK LIBRARY(2); PEE-WEE HERMAN PRODUCTIONS, INC./HBO; MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES(2); RIGHT PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: EVERETT(2); SHUTTERSTOCK; JOHN KISCH ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES