Paul Reubens has taken on dozens of minor film and TV roles, but he could take on dozens more without ever blunting the iconic impact of his signature character, Pee-wee Herman. As an L.A. improv comic, Reubens came into his own when he invented the spastic, gray-suited man-child and developed a cult-hit stage show around him. Pee-wee was later a hit in theaters (in Tim Burton's 1985 feature Pee-wee's Big Adventure and the 1988 follow-up Big-Top Pee-wee) and on TV (on CBS' trippy Saturday-morning show Pee-wee's Playhouse). Unfortunately, in 1991, shortly after Playhouse ended its five-year TV run, Reubens was arrested during a sting on an adult-movie theater. For the next year, he was a public punchline.
He rebounded with a recurring role on Murphy Brown, a slew of voiceover work in animated features, including Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, and a series of bit parts in films, including a joyously flamboyant, well-reviewed performance in 2001's Blow. But in 2002, he made headlines again for a scandal involving his private erotica collection. (He pled guilty to a misdemeanor, and more serious charges were dropped.) Since then, Reubens has largely stayed behind the scenes, doing more voiceover work and working on scripts for two Pee-wee Herman movies: a black comedy intended for adults, and another children's movie. Pee-wee is also making a comeback in other ways: Playhouse is now appearing on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup, and Reubens' live stage performance The Pee-wee Herman Show just debuted on DVD. To commemorate both, Reubens recently chatted with The A.V. Club about his work in and out of the little gray suit.
The A.V. Club: Several years back, you were working on producing two new Pee-wee Herman movies. What's the status of those projects?
Paul Reubens: It's funny, a few years ago, I thought what I refer to as the "dark Pee-wee movie" was going to get made first, but now it looks like the beginning of 2007, like February-ish, I could be ready to start filming the second script, which is the movie version of the CBS kids' show Pee-wee's Playhouse. In that show, we never left the playhouse. Whereas this is kind of an epic adventure. It's all those really kind of clunky characters… Chairry, for example. It's a little cumbersome getting him out of the playhouse. So just that aspect of the story alone makes it kind of a fun script, because you've never actually seen any of those characters out of the playhouse.
AVC: Are you planning to use the same puppets, or are you going to update their look, or use CGI?
PR: I'm not sure about that. My feeling is to try to make it look as low-tech as possible, so I'm not sure whether that means CGI that's designed to look low-tech, or whether it really is low-tech. That's kind of a budgetary thing. I don't know the answer to that.
AVC: Do you have a director in mind?
PR: No, I don't really. I wish I could direct it, but that just seems like too much to me. I don't really want to direct myself, but I'm certainly torn in that direction.
AVC: If you found you could only get funding for one or the other of those films, which one would you make?
PR: Jeez, that's a great question. I love both of these scripts, and I've been living with them and talking about them, as you mentioned, for years now. One of them was written before Playhouse was going, so… Gosh, I just don't know how to answer that. I really like both of them. I could answer that easier if… I have three scripts, actually, and one of them, I could easily not make, but these two? I feel really compelled to make both. They're very different.
AVC: You've said that for a few years, you stopped referring to the adult film as "dark Pee-wee" or "adult Pee-wee" because that label scared producers off. That seems surprising, given all the nostalgia for the '70s and '80s, and the way people love to see their favorite childhood characters recontextualized for adults.
PR: I don't think it's so much the idea that frightens people as the idea that Pee-wee Herman had a kids' show. So would people be confused and come to a black comedy if they thought it was for kids? I really don't know. And it's probably an exaggeration. I doubt if anyone is really scared off by it. I guess more than anything, I never really subscribe to many of those kinds of rules anyway. I feel like when I started out, people weren't banging down the doors, like "Let's make a Pee-wee movie." When we announced we were working on Pee-wee's Big Adventure, people said, "I don't get it, I don't see how it's a movie. It seems like a David Letterman sort of thing."
AVC: In the '80s, you played Pee-wee almost as a performance-art piece, refusing to be photographed out of character and building him up as a discrete entity from yourself. If you return to the character, will you be that immersed in the role again?
PR: I don't think so. I think there was a time when most people didn't realize that I had a different name and wasn't Pee-wee Herman. That's not the case any more, and that's just how it is. I just thought it worked better if it didn't seem like an actor playing that person. I guess at this point, some people will think that, and other people won't.
AVC: Given some of the highly publicized issues you've been though, do you think that separation from the character insulated you at all?
PR: You know what, I've commented on all that a couple of times, and I don't really like to think about it or comment on it.
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