In the final months before his death in July 2023, Paul Reubens got a chance to get a “message in at the last minute,” as he put it. Sitting down for over 40 hours of interviews for the HBO documentary Pee-wee as Himself, the actor, comedian, and Pee-wee Herman creator came out as gay, discussed his “devastating” scandals, and offered new insight into a life that he had always kept secret.
“I had many, many secret relationships,” Reubens says in the documentary, which premiered this week at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. “I was secretive about my sexuality even to my friends [out of] self-hatred or self-preservation,” he says at another point. “I was conflicted about sexuality. But fame was way more complicated.”
Pee-wee as Himself was first announced in 2021, with Matt Wolf directing and Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie serving as executive producers. Reubens himself consented to the project and spent “several hundred hours” discussing it with Wolf (per Variety), but kept his struggle with cancer secret to the filmmakers until days before his death.
In an audio recording sent to Wolf during his final days, Reubens explained, “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. To be labeled a pariah; to have people be scared of you, or untrusting.”
Rising to fame in the early ‘80s with his Pee-wee character, Reubens experienced considerable success with 1985’s Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and the CBS Saturday morning show Pee-wee’s Playhouse. But after an arrest for indecent exposure in 1991, and another in 2002 for possession of obscene material that allegedly improperly depicted minors, he experienced a “devastating” fall from grace.
“People had never seen a photo of me other than Pee-wee Herman, and all of a sudden, I had a Charlie Manson mugshot,” he said. “I lost control of my anonymity. It was devastating.”
Indeed, the media backlash had a lasting impact on Reubens. “It’s shocking what horrible, awful stuff people think about me,” he says. “It’s still a significant footnote … 30 years later I still feel the effects all the time.”
Elsewhere in the documentary, Reubens details hardships the public wasn’t privy to, like his struggle with identity when Pee-wee Herman first took off. Revealing that certain mannerisms of the character were inspired by a boyfriend of his named Guy, Reubens explained that once his career started gaining momentum, his personal life went on the back-burner.
“I was out of the closet, and then I went back in the closet,” he says. “I wasn’t pursuing the Paul Reubens career; I was pursuing the Pee-wee Herman career … I hid behind an alter ego.”
As for Guy — who shaped Pee-wee’s character with campy sayings like “Mmmm! Buttery!” — Reubens recalls visiting him in the hospital as he was dying of AIDS. “To talk about seeing someone at death’s door… He probably died a couple hours after that.”
Other topics tackled in the documentary are Reubens’ relationships with friends like Debi Mazar and Phil Hartman, as well as behind-the-scenes stories from various Pee-wee productions, and more. The documentary will soon become available to stream on Max.
For more, revisit our article celebrating Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, or Liz Shannon Miller’s shout-out to his hilarious death scene from 1992’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.