It’s hard to over-emphasize how solidly Paul Reubens’ star persona is fused with his famous character, Pee-wee Herman.
Reubens created Pee-wee in the late ’70s during his tenure with the famous L.A. improv group The Groundlings. Initially, Pee-wee was childlike but not created for specifically for children. As a stage show in the early ’80s, The Pee-wee Herman Show featured bits like using shoe mirrors to look up a girl’s skirt to see her underwear, only for the girl to proudly declare she’s not wearing underpants at all. In 1981, HBO produced a special of the stage show (playing at The Roxy Theatre) and as of this writing you can watch it on YouTube (yes, I do recommend giving it a view).
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (Tim Burton, 1985) shifted the character into the realm of (absurd) family comedy, and it was a box-office success. Audiences found the character endearing, with young audiences delighting in Pee-wee’s energetic kookiness and adult audiences appreciating the campiness of the Pee-wee persona. The success of the film led to the children’s television show that many people of my generation grew up watching.
Throughout the late ’80s, Paul Reubens adopted Pee-wee fully for his star persona. He always did publicity in character, going on talk shows as Pee-wee and never appearing as the actor Paul Reubens. By the time 1990 rolled around, Reubens was ready for something new, but was stuck inside a gilded cage. He declined CBS’ offer to renew Pee-wee’s Playhouse for another season, but what could he do next? Who was the “real” Paul Reubens?
Then, in 1991, well… You know what happened. The most famous children’s television star was arrested in an adult movie theater, allegedly masturbating to a pornographic film. If he had been a different kind of comedian, maybe he could have ridden out the storm — even joked about it — but as the pink face and high-pitched voice of kid TV, it was a career-ender.
At least, that’s what everyone thought.
Reubens quietly kept working over the years, continuing to appear as campy characters (Amilyn in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Spleen in Mystery Men) and doing voice work for animated movies and TV shows. He stopped doing press for almost a decade, but rebuilt his career through a diverse array of roles that perhaps he should have pursued from the start.
In 1999, Paul Reubens appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to promote Mystery Men. For the first time in his career, at almost 50 years old, he did a talk show appearance as himself, as the “real” actor Paul Reubens. The interview begins with a bit that is clearly pre-planned but that Jay Leno seems uncertain how to handle. Leno asks Reubens questions, to which Reubens responds with pre-printed notecards. It takes a minute before we hear his voice, and he starts out with the Pee-wee inflection. When he switches to his “real” voice, soft-spoken and smooth-toned, the audience cheers. It’s disarming.
Still, Reubens couldn’t give up Pee-wee. Even in the 1999 Leno interview, he announced that he was writing a new Pee-wee movie, and he showed fake vacation photos with himself dressed as Pee-wee photoshopped next to models Cindy Crawford and Vendela Kirsebom.
Back in 1985, the then-31-year-old Paul Reubens proclaimed, “I’ll tell you one thing, though… I don’t want to be a 50-year-old man with a really bad toupee and a facelift doing this. That’s out of the question.” In 2016, 64-year-old Reubens finally released a new Pee-wee film on Netflix, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday (dir. John Lee), though I won’t speculate whether Reubens donned a toupee and got a facelift for the film.
Despite the scandal that prompted Reubens’ temporary separation from Pee-wee, it was probably good for his overall career, giving him a chance to try new kinds of characters and get distance from children’s entertainment. But although Pee-wee doesn’t completely define Reubens’ persona anymore, it will forever be his most loved character, whose name, voice, and mannerisms are more well known than the actor who plays him.
Watch Paul Reubens in his iconic film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure on January 20 at 10 pm as part of the Not-Quite Midnights series.