Interview

If you grew up in the 1980s, some part of your brain has been permanently altered by the phenomenon of Pee-wee Herman. For most kids, images of the adult-size, vaguely ADD-addled eternal child in a tight gray suit and a red miniature bow tie (more than two decades pre-Thom Browne) stem from the blockbuster bike picaresque Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985) or the long-running live-action Saturday morning show Pee-wee’s Playhouse (1986–1991). But those two mainstream iter­ations weren’t actor Paul Reubens’s first runs with the loud and lovable Pee-wee. He initially improvised and polished the character in the late 1970s at the Ground­lings Theatre in L.A. and built Pee-wee into a cultish live-stage comedy show in the early ’80s. While hardly X-rated, these early renditions weren’t particularly prime for an audience of nine-year-olds scarfing down Frosted Flakes on Saturday mornings. And perhaps the very fact that Pee-wee appealed to adults as well as children—that he actually arrived in a playhouse via a nightclub—is what made the character so compelling, if slightly off-kilter. Today, Reubens compares what he was doing to performance art. He gave up his entire public persona to the Pee, even doing interviews and award shows as his alter ego.

The 1990s lost track of Pee-wee following Reubens’s much-publicized arrest in 1991 for indecent exposure at a Sarasota, Florida, movie theater. Reubens set the character aside and went on to appear in films such as Mystery Men (1999), and Blow (2001), and on TV shows such as 30 Rock and Pushing Daisies. (He will also be seen in Todd Solondz’s upcoming sequel to Happiness, Life During Wartime.) This November, though, Reubens, 57, is reviving his long-lost comic juggernaut (and of course some of the characters that filled his playhouse too) when he opens an entirely new Pee-wee Herman Show live onstage in Hollywood. He’s also finished a new Pee-wee film script. Paul Rudd, a longtime Pee-wee fan and fellow lifetime member of the “P.R. initials” Hollywood inner circle, sizes up the man in the undersize suit.

PAUL RUDD:  Paul and Paul. P.R. and P.R.

PAUL REUBENS:  That’s right. I’m glad you mentioned that. I want to make sure everybody realized we had the same initials.

RUDD:  [laughs] Now we just need to get Pamela Reed on the phone.

REUBENS:  [gasps] Good idea. I love Pam Reed. Did you ever work with her?

RUDD:  No. She’s the first other P.R. that I thought of. Pat Robertson—not as good. [Reubens gasps] Paul Rodriguez. Paul Rudnick.

REUBENS:  Wow. This is sort of cheapening the whole idea of you and me being the only two cool guys in show business with P.R.

RUDD: Let me ask you something. Do you think if somehow either you or I contacted Paul Rudnickor Paul Rodriguez, we could all go somewhere on vacation?

REUBENS:  Well, I used to know Paul Rodriguez a long time ago when we were both coming up in show business, so I think it’s possible. I wouldn’t mind combining that idea with doing something I’ve never done before, like going on a cruise. But that could be a mistake because you’re trapped on board. What if you, me, and Paul Rodriguez all of a sudden had a problem with Paul Rudnick?

RUDD:  Which undoubtedly we would. But Paul could also go down to the casino or play shuffleboard.

REUBENS:  Or accidents happen at sea all the time. It’s so weird that there is Paul Rudd and Paul Rudnick. I never thought of that before.

RUDD:  I’m the one who wrote Jeffrey [1995].

REUBENS:  The only thing I have like that is RuPaul.

Photo credit: Paul Reubens in Los Angeles, August 2009. Suit and Shirt: Thom Browne.