Pee-wee as Himself

When Paul Reubens (best known for creating the cult icon Pee-wee Herman) died from cancer on July 30, 2023, he was in the middle of shooting a documentary about his life with filmmaker Matt Wolf. Only, in more than 40 hours of interviews he’d conducted with Wolf, Reubens had opted not to disclose his diagnosis, leaving the project with a thorny question this two-part HBO docuseries never shies away from: Who ultimately gets the last word? Is it the documentarian who gets to shape Pee-wee as Himself as an intentionally messy interrogation into the performative layers Reubens constructed around his sense of self, in public and private? Or is it the actor himself, who, even in death, found a way to rebuke an attempt to ground this portrait in something as elusive as authentic disclosure? Wolf’s documentary looks back at Reuben’s career and allows his own combative confessionals to help frame the posthumous portrait the comedic actor never lived to see. For offering a biographical documentary that explores and embodies the contradictions that structured Reubens’ life and work as a queer performer who never could escape the safety and power that came from hiding within the act of performance, Pee-wee as Himself wins a Peabody award.