Bomer sees our shared humanity
Matt Bomer plays a weatherman in his new movie, “Papi Chulo,” but he didn’t shadow TV meteorologists to prepare for the role.
What he was most concerned about was making sure the nervous breakdown his character has on live television was believable. To capture those emotions, he did a deep dive on the internet.
“I don’t want to say it’s there for your viewing pleasure because I’m not about laughing at the expense of others, but there are some documented breakdowns on camera that people have had,” Bomer explains. “There’s one, and he’s very open about this ... so I feel OK sharing about this, (ABC News’) Dan Harris specifically had a nervous breakdown on camera. So I watched a lot of that.” (Harris chronicled the experience in his 2014 memoir, “10% Happier.”)
Writer-director John Butler’s “Papi Chulo” is the story of an unlikely friendship that develops between Sean (a gay weatherman who is struggling with what appears to be a breakup with his longtime boyfriend), played by Bomer, and his Mexican handyman Ernesto (Alejandro Patiño).
Bomer says the movie has a message, one that resonates more today than anyone would have expected when they first
“They’re not just the sassy stylist or the friend with a lot of attitude.”
June 9 birthdays: — Matt Bomer on the quality of gay characters today
began the project.
“In a time where people are building up walls and separating off and cordoning themselves off from each other and different cultures and different ideologies, more than ever this was about a friendship that forms in the most unlikely of ways — that it’s our shared humanity that is really the only thing that can really save you from loneliness,” Bomer said.
Since publicly coming out in 2012 when he thanked his husband, Hollywood publicist Simon Halls, and their three sons while accepting an award from an AIDS organization in Palm Springs, California, Bomer has played a slew of gay characters. In the DC Universe series “Doom Patrol,” he stars as gay superhero Larry Trainor ( aka Negative Man). There’s Emmy buzz surrounding his work as Will’s fiance on “Will & Grace,” and he’s about to start shooting “The Boys in the Band,” a Netflix movie adaptation of the Tony-nominated Broadway play revival of the same name about a group of gay men in New York City in the late 1960s. Bomer will reprise the role he played in the stage production as will the rest of the cast of all openly gay actors.
“I think we’re in this great boon time now where people are actually writing gay characters with three dimensions,” Bomer said. “They’re not just the sassy stylist or the friend with a lot of attitude or the guys who’s going to help the straight guy pull it together.”
“Papi Chulo” opens nationwide on June 14.