Matt Bomer looks too good to be true: zinging blue eyes, dark shirt partially unbuttoned, glossy black hair a mere kiss-curl away from Christopher Reeve-era Superman. The 42-year-old actor even has a sunny disposition, despite it being not yet 10am in Los Angeles. He is video-calling from the bright attic room of the home he shares with his husband, the Hollywood publicist Simon Halls, and their three sons; a rubber plant yoo-hoos over his shoulder. Presumably, Bomer just tumbled out of bed looking that way and plonked himself in front of the webcam. “I wish,” he smiles, exuding the faintly weary graciousness of someone whose appearance has been attracting comment since long before he was named sexiest man on TV in 2011. “I’ve already been up a while, making breakfast, getting the kids settled into ‘Zoom school’ and trying to get my meditation in.”
That reference to meditation can’t help but call to mind the Oprah-quoting, reiki-practising stripper Ken, whom he played in the two Magic Mike movies. “I don’t really know if I use the same meditation techniques that Ken does,” he laughs. “But I think there was definitely something about me there which Reid [Carlin, the screenwriter] was riffing on.”
Bomer’s latest film, The Boys in the Band, is an altogether pricklier proposition. Adapted from Mart Crowley’s 1968 play, a staple of the gay canon, it takes place entirely at a birthday party thrown by Michael (Jim Parsons) for his imperious friend Harold (Zachary Quinto). Bomer plays Michael’s squeeze, Donald, who is content to take a backseat as the bitching and soul-baring stretch into the wee small hours. “Donald has done enough work on himself to be a compassionate observer,” Bomer says. “He’s not a saint by any means but he can see outside his own neurosis.”
The actor wasn’t familiar with the play, or with William Friedkin’s 1970 film version, before he was cast in the 50th anniversary Broadway run in 2018. That production, which went on to win the Tony for best revival of a play, was a minor breakthrough: it boasted an entirely out gay cast, the same one that has been reunited for the film version. Not that Bomer thinks such roles should be played only by gay performers. “I’ve been doing theatre professionally since I was 17,” he says. “Everyone just played everything, really. But I do understand the need for equal opportunity and access to roles for people across the LGBTQ spectrum. We need to see access for everyone.” And then? “May the best actor win, I guess.”
The self-pitying tenor of some of the characters may sit uneasily with our fluid and unabashed times but Bomer believes the play’s importance comes from capturing an age before queerness was clearly defined, let alone accepted. “It all takes place a few months before Stonewall,” he points out. “It’s about this moment right before that explosion, that revolution, and in a way the characters feel like they’re going to be trapped in this play until something changes. My favourite line is when Michael asks what time it is and I reply: ‘It’s early.’ I feel that’s true for the movement and where these men were; it really was early in their development. Donald is looking to the horizon for something beyond all this and there’s nothing there – it’s uncharted territory.”
Making the film took a heavier toll even than performing the show eight times a week. “At the end of the play each night there’s some closure. You’ve purged. Whereas on film, you have time to go home and overthink. It’s this lingering experience that bubbles up throughout the shoot. Sometimes with films I need to do something ritualistic to bring the experience to a close once it’s finished.” I ask for an example but he demurs. “Oh, it will all sound too esoteric and strange. I’d rather keep it mysterious than make it corny.” In the absence of further clarification, we will just have to picture him dancing naked around a campfire as he feeds his Boys in the Band script to the flames one page at a time.
Donald remarks of his sexuality that he has “always known it about myself”. Did Bomer? “I did once I reached my early teens. But I was also part of a very religious family living in a hyper-conservative environment in the bible belt in Texas so it became a bifurcated experience for me.” Even television and film were off-limits on occasion. “The boundaries shifted quite a bit. Sometimes they’d be relaxed, sometimes more stringent, depending on where my family’s religious values were at any given time. If Dad was really on fire for the Lord all of a sudden, you knew the hammer would come down. Although my brother and I as kids always found a way to access everything we wanted to see.” Forbidden fruit, eh? “Exactly. What could be more biblical than that?”
He came out to his parents in a letter, which was met with six months of silence from them followed by a raging argument – and, some years later, their eventual acceptance. A public coming-out occurred in an awards speech in 2012 during which he thanked Halls and their children. His career was already on the rise by then, though it might be argued that there was no other direction it could have gone in after the 2006 horror prequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. “I thought: ‘Michael Bay’s producing, it’s Texas, it’s a world I understand, and it ends with the guy becoming Leatherface with my face on. Why not?’”
He progressed to the science-fiction thriller In Time and landed the lead role as a charming con-artist in six seasons of White Collar; prior to that, he has joked, he starred in so many cancelled TV series that he didn’t realise shows could last for more than one season. His prospects appear not to have been harmed or altered by coming out: he subsequently played a killer in the Russell Crowe/Ryan Gosling comic thriller The Nice Guys, a farmer in the remake of The Magnificent Seven and the studio boss Monroe Stahr in a TV version of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. (For many years, he was set to play Montgomery Clift in a passion project he had been developing about the actor, though that recently fell through.)
“I’d be lying to you if I said certain things didn’t change for me,” he admits. “Certain rooms I used to frequent – suddenly the door was closed. But I also engaged with artists who don’t care, who just want the actor they believe is best for the role, and those are the artists I wanted to be working with anyway so I don’t count it as any kind of loss.” One of his most loyal collaborators is Ryan Murphy, who produced The Boys in the Band and directed the 2014 TV adaptation of Larry Kramer’s Aids drama The Normal Heart, which won Bomer a Golden Globe.
As someone who grew up gay in the 1980s and 1990s, he is struck by the generational difference in attitudes today. “I look at our children’s friends and I see they don’t even bat an eyelid about our boys having two dads. That makes me very optimistic about the future.” Where does work such as The Boys in the Band and The Normal Heart fit into this utopia? “I would be upset if these heroes that came before us were forgotten or went unappreciated. The younger generation I hope will take the time to understand everything our community has been through over the years and to recognise the shoulders we now stand on.”
It’s the sort of climate of equality that resulted recently in Bomer’s 15-year old son Kit coming out as straight. “That is a story that people have run with,” he says with a good-natured groan. “I love that he felt so comfortable he could say that. But it wasn’t some big moment where he pulled us aside; it wasn’t eventised. It was casual. Obviously it’s an interesting soundbite and very clickbait-y. He thinks it’s hilarious, by the way. He’s like: ‘That’s my favourite story!’” So should we play it down or play it up? “Play it down. He’s 15, you know? We really don’t need to be taking cues from him right now.” I’ll bury it near the end of the article, I promise him.
• The Boys in the Band is on Netflix from 30 September
