Matt and Jonathan were featured in one of Emmy Magazine’s issues last month, still as part of their Emmy campaign for Fellow Travelers. Visit our gallery for outtakes and scans of Matt from the issue!
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The love affair in Fellow Travelers doesn’t end happily — that’s clear from the opening scene — but the Showtime limited series resonates as a romance for the ages because of its captivating 30-year journey.
“Being able to step into a gay love story as sweeping as Fellow Travelers, and to tell this brilliant story that explores four decades of liberation for gender, for women, for race, for civil rights — and the way all those intersect — is fascinating,” says costar Jonathan Bailey (Bridgerton).
Inspired by Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel, the eight-episode limited series from Ron Nyswaner (Homeland) explores a forbidden relationship in 20th-century America. In 1952, Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller (Matt Bomer) is a war hero and State Department official who hides his sexual encounters with men. Then he sparks with the younger Tim Laughlin (Bailey), a Catholic idealist who begins working for Senator Joseph McCarthy. Their passionate romance is forced into the shadows by an executive order that authorizes a witch hunt for government workers engaged in “sexual perversions.”
The liaison servers as a framework for the evolving LGBTQ experience. The Lavender Scare of the 1950s gives way to the 1960s, when an unsatisfied, married Hawk raises two kids while Tim protests the Vietnam War. They live through the gay rights movement and White Night riots of the 1970s, and in the 1980s, they face the AIDS epidemic.
“I’ve never been part of a project that has invited so much conversation, vulnerability and engagement from complete strangers,” Bomer says. “Men and women, straight and LGBTQIA, saw themselves or someone they loved in the material.”
Both actors still feel the weight of playing their characters. “Hawk is the most complicated, multifaceted and compartmentalized character I’d ever read,” adds Bomer, an Emmy nominee for the 2014 TV film The Normal Heart. “He’s a survivor, an iconoclast and a renegade.” Seconds Bailey, “Tim’s journey in his search for something more is so [powerful]; he’s who I am today as a person. He’s a character that I have yet to fully grieve.”