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The man staring into the camera is not Pee-wee Herman. He may look a little like him, kinda sorta sound like him, have that same sly, agent-of-chaos-reporting-for-duty-sir smirk. But he is not the man in the tight gray flannel suit, the one who went from cult-figure famous to beloved by millions. “Hi, I’m Paul Reubens, on the set of the untitled Paul Reubens documentary,” he says, speaking directly into the camera. Should you think he takes this too seriously, the character actor with the impressive IMDb page launches into a folksy origin story — born in 1938 on the banks of the Mississippi river, his father worked the steamboats; “they called him … Steamboat Milton.”
Then Reubens shares a revelation that he’s only recently learned: “Turns out you’re not supposed to direct your own documentary. You’re not supposed to control [it].” This intensely private man, whose performance-art alter ego became an above-the-title star of stage and screen while he purposefully puppet-mastered in the shadows, doesn’t like the idea of being stuck in the passenger seat of his own story. He mentions fighting with the person on the other side of the camera about who’s going to be calling the shots here. It’s probably not the first time they’ve had this exchange. Not the last, either.
Pee-wee as Himself, the two-part, three-and-a-half-hour doc on both Reubens and the Frankenstein-monster manchild who eclipsed him, is nothing if not a portrait of the artist as a control freak. (It premiered at Sundance last night and will play on HBO in the spring.) Centered around a 40-hour interview Reubens conducted with director Matt Wolf (Wild Combination, Spaceship Earth), it’s designed to capture the person as much as the persona and the scandals. I just want to set the record straight on a few things, Reubens says early on, and even though he didn’t divulge to the filmmakers that he’d been battling cancer for close to six years when he sat for the camera, it now reads as something like a last-word-and-testament. What the doc really ends up being about, however, is conflict — between the subject and his chronicler, but also the subject and his creation. The title comes from his credit on the 1985 movie that helped make Herman a household name. Judges would have also accepted Pee-wee vs. Himself.
Reubens’ motto during the Pee-wee years was “Pay no attention to the man behind the bow tie”; for a long time, he refused to do interviews out of character. The documentary significantly adds to the origin story, tracing Reubens’ early days and infatuation with TV kids’ shows and Disney movies — Pollyanna was a favorite — and fleshing out the family’s move to Florida. Specifically, the city of Sarasota, which also happened to be the Southern hub of the Ringling Bros. circus. This was where the allure of all that showbiz happening on television became a reality for Reubens. It’s also where he began flirting with countercultural ideas, playing around with androgyny and drag (the photos of a teenage Reubens taken by his friend Ann Prim feel like seeing a budding flower tentatively starting to bloom), and exploring a Warhol-era sense of queerness. Like so many young men, he went west and then to school at Cal Arts, where he stood as out as a weirdo di tutti weirdos among the freaks and geeks. David Hasselhoff and Katy Segal were in his acting ensemble. The idea of “living conceptually” — of performance art as a full-time lifestyle choice — really begins here.
Pee-wee as Himself is also the first time that Reubens, to the best of our knowledge, has spoken at length about his relationship with Guy, a painter he met at a party at Cal Arts and fell madly in love with. They moved in together in Los Angeles, and per Paul, began “playing house.” It was serious enough that Reubens introduced Guy to his parents. He was also sending his headshots out and trying to make it as a serious actor, occasionally getting small parts in even smaller movies. Feeling like he was in an either/or situation — be part of a domesticated duo or focus on his career — Reubens chose the latter. His story about seeing Guy one last time in New York, mere hours before he died of an AIDS-related illness, suggests that he never quite got over him. Still, Reubens pinpoints this as the moment when he declared that he would be neither openly gay nor in a relationship, because it would affect his professional life. And his professional life always won out, “because that was something I could control.”
Except, of course, Reubens couldn’t control it. This is where Pee-wee Ground Zero enters the picture. Having made his way to the legendary improv group the Groundlings yet failing to make it into Saturday Night Live‘s newly rejiggered cast — he knew he wouldn’t make the cut when he noticed a similarly dweeby Gilbert Gottfried was also auditioning — Reubens put all of his chips on one character he’d been developing. The concept was a stand-up comic who was irredeemably awkward. A Pee-wee harmonica provided the first name. Memories of a manic, obnoxious kid in Florida whose surname was Herman completed the handle. The group’s stage show would double as something like a live-act pilot for a fake TV series. The commitment to the conceptual bit would be total. As an experiment, Reubens decided to go on The Dating Game to see if people would take Pee-wee seriously. They did. A star is born.
From here, Pee-wee as Himself, Part One speeds through the greatest hits — the Roxy show, the regular Letterman appearances, the tour put together by manager William McEuen, writing Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, becoming a movie star — and stops right as he’s about to develop Pee-wee’s Playhouse. We’ve seen how Reubens has magpied various influences and elements to concoct this giggling goofball. And we’ve also seen how he keeps passive-aggressively (and occasionally straightforward aggressively) bickering with Wolf about how much or how little Paul Reubens, as opposed to “Paul Reubens,” he’s willing to show. If the rise aspect of this two-parter ends up being slightly more compelling than the fall and subsequent series of mini-phoenix ascents that dominate Part Two, it’s worth noting that the back half is just as personal and psychologically intriguing. Reubens has finally found a way to have his fame and keep a semblance of anonymity, but at a cost. There’s a sense of an identity crisis at work: I know you’re Pee-wee, but who am I?
He made peace with that aspect. By the time he died, most people knew who Paul Reubens was, and his non-Pee-wee Herman career as a character actor was as lauded as much as the character. But decades of hiding behind an alter ego and a carefully guarded life away from the spotlight — until circumstance meant it couldn’t be so carefully guarded — made the ability of Reubens to truly open up that much tougher, even as the end draws nearer. Part Two details the lows, the shaming and the trials by court of public opinion. It also gives you glimpses of a tug-of-war happening behind the scenes. Reubens wanted to control the narrative that had been taken away from him a few times, and the result is like watching two dogs wrestle over a bone. Wolf wants a full warts-and-all picture. Reubens doesn’t trust him in terms of the warts. Part One details someone finally opening up. Part Two details a gradual closing down.
Reubens was supposed to sit for a final interview that would have delved deeper into his second arrest, which suggested that his collection of vintage erotica contained images of minors. He was too sick to do it, and Pee-wee as Himself ends with a voice message left by Reubens a few days before his passing, lamenting how he’d been portrayed by those who didn’t know him. This documentary ends up being both a definitive look at Pee-wee Herman and a reintroduction to Reubens as a subversive comedic genius. But if Reubens becomes slightly less of a mystery, he still remains a mystery. The doc wants everything on the table, and the subject wants to handpick how said table is set. It ends in a draw.
This originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
