'He never wanted to be perceived as a victim'

Paul Reubens spent years as Pee-wee Herman hiding his true self from public view. Now the star, who died in 2023, opens up in anew documentary. Adam White meets its director

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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