Hunky actor’s call of the wild
MATT Bomer is a man with a famously pretty face — who can forget his Ken doll stage act in “Magic Mike”? But the 39-year-old actor actually loves getting scraggly and unwashed in the great outdoors. In his new film, “Walking Out,” Bomer gets back to his Texas roots, playing a father who takes his son on a hunting trip.
“I come from a family of outdoorsmen, where fathers and sons bonded through fishing and hunting,” Bomer tells The Post. But unlike his character, Cal, who meticulously plans to kill a moose for food with his son (Josh Wiggins), Bomer never went for big game. “I kept it more to fowl,” he says. “But I would go with my dad and sit in the blind with him while he was deer hunting.”
“Walking Out” is a spare, two-man show. “Ninetyfive percent of it was me and Josh on the side of a mountain in Montana,” says Bomer, whose past gigs include USA’s “White Collar,” the HBO movie “The Normal Heart” and Amazon’s “The Last Tycoon.” At one point, the injured Cal sits under a tree and a deer approaches.
“That was one of the most incredible experiences I’ve ever had,” Bomer says. “You can’t prepare for it. These local people said they’d had a tame, curious deer come to their house in the mornings. I just had to sit at the base of that tree and wait.”
Not only did the deer show up — she put her face next to Bomer’s and licked him. “It was kind of a spiritual experience, to be honest,” he says. “One of those things you hope you can just be in the moment for.”
Bomer, who has three children with his husband, publicist Simon Halls, says his family tries to get out in nature despite being Los Angeles-based. “We’re not a hunting family,” he says, “but we do fish. We only keep what we need to eat.”
Despite its adversity, he hopes people come away from “Walking Out” inspired to go adventuring. “We have so many presupposed notions about what to instill in our children,” he says. “But it’s often in the most unplanned moments, when the s-- t hits the fan, that we create opportunities to bond and pass things on to each other. Sometimes, even, from the child to the parent.”