The American actor and performance artist Paul Reubens spent decades in the cloak of his alter ego, the strange, effervescent children’s entertainer Pee-wee Herman. Reubens liked the shadows and the cultivation of mystique. Secrets were professionally necessary, he insisted, as well as a cushion for prying eyes. They could also be fun. But even when he agreed to participate in a documentary about his life – where he’d publicly discuss his sexuality for the first time, and the circumstances that led to two high-profile, career-derailing scandals – he kept one particular card close to his chest. He was dying. And the man making the documentary had no idea.
“He was entitled to keep that to himself,” explains filmmaker Matt Wolf, from his home in New York. “He probably didn’t want me to treat him differently, or to tell his story through that lens. And he never wanted to be perceived as a victim.” Still, Wolf found himself destabilised by the revelation, which he learnt about at the same time as everyone else: when news broke in July 2023 that Reubens had died at the age of 70. He had been diagnosed with cancer six years earlier. “I immediately went back and read the transcripts of our interviews, and really searched in my brain: were there signs or indications that this was happening? And yes, there were some – but in lots of ways it didn’t matter.”
The secrecy around Reubens’ health, and his death towards the end of what was intended to be their allotted time together, lends Wolf’s new documentary, Pee-wee as Himself, some of its greatest power – and Wolf seems to agree. “It raises a kind of existential question about the extent to which you can know anybody, especially someone so accustomed to being secretive, who was attracted to the idea of mystery,” he says. “A limitation, particularly in documentary filmmaking, is how close and how intimate you can truly get with a subject. Paul was the most complex and challenging version of that, but I felt that I got pretty damn close.”
For much of his professional career, Reubens found greater comfort presenting as Herman than as himself. A helium-voiced eccentric in grey slacks and a kicky red bowtie, Herman was one of a number of sketch characters Reubens created while working with the improv group The Groundlings in the late Seventies. He quickly became his signature role – think of him as a kookier Lily Savage, or Keith Lemon if he wasn’t woeful; a fictional alter ego rapidly folded into the cultural fabric.
Within years of his screen debut in a Cheech and Chong movie, as well as appearances on talk shows and in HBO specials, Herman had his own film (Tim Burton’s directorial debutPee-wee’s Big Adventure, in 1985) and then his own TV show. Like all the best children’s television, Pee-wee’s Playhouse straddled the line between innocent fantasia and adult-friendly exuberance. It ran from 1986 until 1990, a vehicle for Reubens’ brand of offbeat wholesomeness – here Herman lived in a colour-splattered home filled with talking furniture and whizz-bang gadgets. The show immortalised Herman – and, to an extent, Reubens – as a pop culture icon, as revered by children as he was by parents and college-age stoners.
“I came of age watching Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” Wolf tells me. “And it spoke to me in a way that back then I wouldn’t have been able to put into words. Now, though, I can see it as something that really espoused values of inclusion, creativity and nonconformity.” It also felt incredibly queer – never literally, but in its sense of kitsch play and camp. “Watching Pee-wee marry a bowl of fruit salad at a slumber party – that means something different to you when you’re a fruity child,” Wolf jokes.
Reubens’ sexuality was always ambiguous. He had sort-of girlfriends, among them character actors Carol Kane and Debi Mazar, who served as platonic gal-pals he’d attend premieres and parties with. But he kept the fact that he was gay a secret – certainly from the public but even to close friends and associates. Early into Pee-wee as Himself, he confirms his sexuality (“I like to decorate,” he teases, “whatever that suggests to you – go ahead”), and also discusses his unusually fraught relationship with the closet: he came out to his family early and was supported immediately by his parents and loved ones, then was romantically involved with an artist for several years. Their break-up, though, changed him.
“I lost my entire personality and my [sense of] self in being emotionally involved with another person,” Reubens explains in the film. “When we split up, I made a conscious decision: ‘I’m not doing this again – I’m not going to be openly gay, I’m not going to be in a relationship. I’m going to advance my career, because I can control that.’” He says this without a hint of self-pity or regret. “I was as out as you could be, and then I went back in the closet.”
“Paul was of a generation in which many gay men did not want their sexuality to define them,” Wolf says. “They thought it should be something not discussed but rather understood.” A “glass closet”, if you will. For Reubens, though, it “also ran a little deeper”, Wolf thinks. “I think he was right that mainstream success and the opportunities he had would not have existed if he were openly gay, but his commitment to staying in the closet did affect him through his life.”
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When Reubens agreed to participate in a documentary, he told Wolf that he wished to come out in it, but was resistant to being framed as any kind of “gay icon”. Wolf, at one point, wanted to spotlight the outrageous, brilliant queerness of 1988’s Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special, which featured guest appearances from Cher, KD Lang, Little Richard and Grace Jones. But Reubens was uncomfortable with it. “He said those people are icons and not ‘gay icons’. It really was an insistence that one should not be defined by their sexuality, or at least he shouldn’t.” Wolf’s background is in documentary film that typically spotlights unheralded queer visionaries, from the musician and disco pioneer Arthur Russell to the illustrator Hilary Knight. “Paul knew that,” he explains. “It was a source of both affinity and tension between us.”
Pee-wee as Himself includes several moments in which Reubens and Wolf clash over their duelling approaches to the film. Reubens is reluctant to cede control of his own story, and repeatedly asks Wolf not to sum up his “narrative” as a tragedy, or lean too heavily into the idea of Reubens being “trapped” by his alter ego. “It’s very easy to turn my story into ‘I’m a victim in some way’, ‘the man behind the mask’, ‘the tears of a clown’,” Reubens tells Wolf at one point. “I rebel against [that].”
Despite Reubens’ worry, Wolf never intended his documentary to define his subject as any one thing. “I wanted Paul to tell the story on his terms,” he says. “I wasn’t willing to make a puff piece, and instead I encouraged Paul to embrace his own complexity, which I think he took to heart. And the things he was saying, I tended to agree with. There is a tragic dimension to Paul’s story, but I didn’t see him as a victim. I saw him as somebody resilient.”
Wolf also understood why Reubens may have been nervous about speaking publicly – he was understandably traumatised by two incidents in which the media had run roughshod over his life. The first came in 1991, when Reubens was arrested for indecent exposure at a Florida pornographic cinema (the charges were later dropped). “I lost control of my anonymity and it was devastating,” Reubens says in the film. “Thirty years later, I still feel the effects [of the incident] all the time.” It was an episode that led to intense mockery and long-term damage to his career. (In one particularly painful bit of archive footage, the late comedian and Simpsons voice actor Phil Hartman – a former friend and collaborator of Reubens – is seen referring to him as a “deviant” on a talk show.) The second incident occurred in 2002, when Reubens was arrested on child pornography charges – a case entirely built on photographic items in Reubens’ vast collection of vintage erotica. In the film, Reubens’ publicist refers to the incident as a “homophobic witch hunt” spearheaded by crooked politicians. (Reubens pleaded guilty in 2004 to a misdemeanour obscenity charge, and the child pornography charges were dropped.)
Reubens grew distant from the documentary over the course of production, and kept delaying an interview with Wolf that would have discussed the 2002 incident. But a day before his death, Reubens sent Wolf a voice note in which he discussed the trauma of that experience, and how heavily it weighed on his decision to make the documentary in the first place. “More than anything, the reason… was to let people see who I really am and how painful and difficult it was to be labelled something that I wasn’t,” he says, his voice hoarse. “The moment I heard someone label me as – I’m just going to say it – a paedophile, I knew it was going to change everything moving forward and backwards.”
In lots of ways, Pee-wee as Himself is an unfinished documentary, interrupted by things far beyond Wolf’s control. But it ends up matching the ambiguity and frustration of its subject – a man who was, by all accounts, a genius, who was difficult, complex, somebody with deep reservoirs of love and compassion, but who was also shrewd and occasionally cold.
“He was somebody highly resistant to fitting into categories, and that was part of what made him a compelling artist,” Wolf says. “He had a peculiar and unique relationship to identity, which is also attributed to the fact that he was completely absorbed in an alter ego publicly. Paul had a different experience of the world than you or I.”
The magic happened, then, whenever he let everybody else take a peek at it.
‘Pee-Wee as Himself’ airs 24 May on Sky Documentaries in the UK, and is streaming on HBO and Max in the US
