Matt Bomer finds intrigue in subtle nuances of ‘Tycoon’
Writer and director Billy Ray returns time and again to stories involving characters operating behind some sort of facade.
His 2003 film, “Shattered Glass,” was informed by a New Republic journalist who fabricated stories. Four years later, “Breach” concerned an FBI agent spying for Russia. Ray’s latest project fits the theme: a nine-hour TV adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s incomplete final novel, “The Last Tycoon.”
“Tycoon” focuses on the push/pull dynamic between Pat Brady, a once-successful movie studio executive played by Kelsey Grammer, and Monroe Stahr, his more able apprentice played by Matt Bomer. Facades abound in “The Last Tycoon.” Some are obvious: big beautiful movie sets in the 2000s built to resemble big beautiful movie sets from the 1930s. Then there are the characters, many of whom are hiding something.
Ray would have had a difficult time finding a better Stahr than Bomer, whose almost imperceptibly pinched smile and down-turned eyes subtly hide a troubled backstory behind an otherwise composed and handsome visage.
Stahr struggles to keep his life and work together through the Amazon series, which becomes available for streaming Friday. He makes a Christmas call home during the show that offers a rare crack in his exterior. Bomer calls that “my favorite scene of the entire season.”
“I hate to say that — I get to work with these wonderful actors and my favorite scene is a phone call. But so much of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work is about the cost of the American dream. What people cast aside and sacrifice in pursuit of power and the American dream. And I think that scene is so evocative of that. And it’s possible to feel lonelier and emptier in success than you felt before.”
Bomer never underwent a reinvention as Stahr did, but he says he related to the scene, which made him think back to his lean years as an actor in New York, making a point to remember to call his parents back in Spring, where he first started working in theater.
“When you go from one thing to another, one location to another, you have to set the time to keep those connections,” he says. “It’s an immersive industry.”
For Bomer the process started at Klein High School, where he gave up football for the drama department as a teen and eventually started working at the Alley Theatre.
“It’s funny because it was so close to Spring, but it was inside the Loop, so it felt like a different world to me,” he says.
Bomer graduated from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon, with its esteemed drama department, in 2001 and started doing theater work in New York as well as landing roles on “All My Children” and “Guiding Light.” Other TV work followed, including roles on “Tru Calling” and “Chuck,” and work in films, including “Flightplan” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.”
Bomer’s breakthrough role, though, came in 2009 with “White Collar,” playing a con artist who assisted an FBI agent. And he won a Golden Globe and received an Emmy nomination for his work on the HBO film “The Normal Heart.”
He had just finished reading Nathanael West’s novel “The Day of the Locust,” a Hollywood-set death-of-the-American-dream novel from 1939, when Ray approached him with “Tycoon.”
“The West novel had me in my own art vs. commerce existential crisis when this project came my way,” Bomer says.
Ray came to Bomer with a labor-of-love-project he’d been developing for years. Ray originally developed “Tycoon” for HBO, which ultimately dropped the show. Amazon swept it up and aired the pilot last year. It was a stylish bit of period piece TV but a little slow getting the story into motion. But the finished “Tycoon” — which Ray developed with assistance from Fitzgerald scholar A. Scott Berg — proves more engrossing. Ray wisely chooses to stay close to Fitzgerald’s thematic content rather than spin his wheels in the language, a common mistake in filmed versions of the novelist’s work.
“Interpreting Fitzgerald is a Herculean task,” Bomer says. “And not for the faint of heart. But I think he did a very smart thing, which was to avoid a line by line interpretation. He focused on some themes and expanded them into a larger story.”
“Tycoon” is an imperfect series, but it is far more satisfying than most, if not all, of the filmed adaptations of Fitzgerald’s works. Others have taken swings at “Tycoon” in film, TV and on the stage, without much success. A 1976 film adaptation had all the right names: It was written by Harold Pinter, directed by Eliza Kazan and starred Robert De Niro. It was a critical and commercial disaster.
That “Tycoon” resisted successful adaptation for so long is almost poetic justice. When he was writing the novel, Fitzgerald had been through the ringer in Hollywood — where he went for financial security and landed in a creative graveyard. The novel was incomplete when he died of a heart attack in 1940 at age 44. A Fitzgerald friend and literary critic edited the text to completion with Fitzgerald’s notes, and the novel was published in 1941.
But through Ray’s lens, “Tycoon” feels like a timely story, despite being set eight decades ago. Issues of gender, age and ethnicity in the old Hollywood studio system retain a thorniness that sticks today.
“Everything old is new again, isn’t it?” Bomer says. “We do sometimes take two steps forward and one step back. I don’t want to get overly political, but the show is reflective of the fact that we’re still having these discussions. Working to perfect who we want to be.”
The future of “Tycoon” will be interesting. At its heart is a ticking bomb of sorts, and the show concludes with an ambiguous scene. Berg told the New York Times the story could be stretched to 50 episodes if demand existed. If Bomer knows the future, he’s not saying.
“It could certainly function as a close-ended story,” he says, laughing. “But I guess we’ll all have to wait and see, right?”