But in pockets of America today, the environment may feel a little different from ’90s Texas or pre-revolution New York. It is in a more progressive era of LGBTQ rights that Murphy’s company produced the film version of The Boys in the Band, with an all-gay male cast that includes Bomer. When he was cast at 17 in a professional production of A Streetcar Named Desire, theater was already his existence. His salvation, he says, came in the school drama department: It became the oxygen of his inner life. “I grew up in a very conservative home, so just being who I was created a kind of bifurcated sense of self.” He attended church, accompanied his father on hunting trips, and played for his high school ball team. His father once played for the Dallas Cowboys. “I grew up in a very conservative home, so just being who I was created a kind of bifurcated sense of self”Įlsewhere, Bomer has shown the breadth of his range while inhabiting men with societally transgressive secret identities, from his big break as unblinking con artist Neal Caffrey in USA Network’s White Collar (2009-2014) to the buffed-up Ken in the Magic Mike films, Steven Soderbergh’s socially underpinned male stripper romps to a transgendered sex worker in Anything (2017).īorn in Missouri, Bomer was raised from the age of 9 in rural Spring, Texas, in the “Bible Belt,” a million miles from gay liberationist New York. In 2018, he starred in the Murphy-produced 50th anniversary Broadway revival of Mart Crowley’s seminal 1968 play, The Boys in the Band, an unapologetic, warts-and-all depiction of a group of gay men living in New York that helped spark Stonewall the latest film adaptation (it was also made into a movie in 1970) landed last week on Netflix. Reportedly, they didn’t speak to him for six months afterward.) (He came out to his parents at age 24, in a letter. The actor came out publicly in 2012, in an acceptance speech at the Desert AIDS Project’s Steve Chase Humanitarian Awards. Also in 2011, Bomer married Halls, Tom Ford’s power publicist. In 2011, he appeared in Dustin Lance Black’s 8 on Broadway, a dramatization of the 2008 trial that overturned Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages in California the play subsequently ran in L.A. government.īomer lost 40 pounds for his Normal Heart role, reduced to nothing but blue eyes and bone. In 2014, he won a Golden Globe for his soul-lascerating performance of a man dying of AIDS in the film version of Larry Kramer’s autobiographical play A Normal Heart, directed by Ryan Murphy and set in the 1980s, when the epidemic was still unacknowledged by the U.S. Instead, Bomer has created a body of work across theater, film and TV with a discernible thematic throughline, his dramatic roles often complementing his role in real life as an LGBTQ activist. GIORGIO ARMANI jacket, CALVIN KLEIN tank and TODD SNYDER pants. “Because I know a Nietzschian nosedive was not the first thing people were looking for in the midst of a pandemic. “Thank you so much for watching it,” he says in a laid-back tone from the Hancock Park home he shares with his husband, Simon Halls, and their three sons: Kit, 15, and twins, Walker and Henry, 12. Meanwhile, Bomer has intelligently mined the concept of the “Super Man” - more specifically, Nietzsche’s Übermensch - in this year’s acclaimed season three of The Sinner on Netflix. Army pilot whose closeted life as a gay man metaphorically burned his soul and he became radioactive. Most recently, for DC Universe’s 2019 series Doom Patrol, he voiced Negative Man aka Larry Trainor (physically played by Bomer in flashbacks), a U.S. When he has dipped his toe into the comicbook realm, he has done so mainly in voiceover. But with a humorous eye for both himself and the ironies of life, the accomplished theater actor seems a man more curious to explore his craft beyond the conventional aggrandizing masculine tropes. With a close resemblance to Clark Kent and a sensitive talent for playing men with dual identities, it’s anyone’s guess why Matt Bomer doesn’t already have a superhero franchise under his utility belt. As The Boys in the Band arrives on Netflix via Broadway, its star talks about acting as activism and his newfound pandemic pastimes
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