Matt Bomer has a natural charm that often shows up in the characters he plays. You could spot it back in White Collar, the USA Network series he starred on from 2009 to 2014. Or in Magic Mike, where he played one of the charismatic strippers. Or more recently in Maestro, playing Leonard Bernstein’s friend and lover David Oppenheim.
It’s a quality that could have allowed Bomer to coast in his career, but instead the actor has purposely taken on challenging roles that have allowed him to reveal other layers to his leading-man abilities. In the 2014 TV movie The Normal Heart, Bomer starred opposite Mark Ruffalo as a closeted New York Times reporter who starts a relationship with Ruffalo’s Ned Weeks just as the AIDS crisis was starting. He lost 50 pounds for the role, and earned his first Emmy nomination.
Back on TV in Fellow Travelers, Bomer once again dove into a period piece about a closeted gay man, this time playing Hawkins Fuller, a.k.a. Hawk, a State Department employee who hides his sexuality during the height of McCarthyism. The Showtime series follows Hawk and Tim (played by Jonathan Bailey) throughout their decades-spanning love affair, while also touching on significant historical moments from the ’50s to the ’80s. It’s a tour de force performance from Bomer that earned him another Emmy nomination. Bomer, who came out publicly in 2012, spoke with Little Gold Men (listen below) about juggling so many decades, gay representation in Hollywood, and why he wants to fall flat on his face these days.
Vanity Fair: Was there anything in your research for Fellow Travelers that really surprised you?
Matt Bomer: I think it was the numbers of it all. Honestly, I didn’t realize that an estimated 10,000 people lost their jobs—that’s a lot of people in government. And sadly that many of them took their own lives because their lives, which they’d worked so hard to conceal, were exposed to everyone, and their career prospects were really limited at that point. And so they just didn’t see a way forward. It was a really dark and tragic time for our community and the country as a whole.
There’s a lot of time periods for you to cover as this character. How did you approach that? I assume, because of the way TV shoots, you were jumping between decades every day?
There were different decades in the same day quite a bit. I think we learned at a certain point to stop doing the ’80s first and then go into the ’50s because of the aging makeup. They basically put kind of a diluted superglue on my face to glue wrinkles together and exacerbate existing wrinkles—it’s really hard to wash off. So all of a sudden I’d be in the ’50s looking 60 years old and it wasn’t a good combination. But oftentimes we’d work in multiple decades in the same day. I had the blessing of time to really work before I got started with a movement coach and I had a little a warm up I did with myself, depending on what the decade was, so that I knew where that lived in my body, and where the character was emotionally, and what he wanted at that time in his life, and what he was in denial of at that time in his life. And I think I was really the beneficiary of getting to be a part of Maestro right before I started filming this. I got to watch Bradley [Cooper] and Carey [Mulligan] go through the decades.
