• Matt and Jonathan did an interview for Entertainment Weekly’s podcast The Awardist recently and discussed Fellow Travelers. They talked about the sex scenes, the episode that Matt dreaded the most, and much more!

    Yes, Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey’s sex scenes in Fellow Travelers consumed social media for a couple months during the limited series’ run on Showtime. But the power dynamic on display wasn’t just for sensationalism; it served a bigger purpose in the journey of the two closeted men.

    They are also scenes that would’ve been difficult to put on screen just a decade ago, and the characters — Bomer’s State Department official Hawk Fuller and Bailey’s congressional staffer Tim Laughlin — very likely would’ve been played by straight men.

    “I don’t even know if I would have seen the script for it 10 years ago,” Bomer says, laughing while seated next to his costar during a chat with EW’s Awardist podcast. But the job was made easier, and “so much of my cynicism was obliterated,” he says, thanks to the support of the network as well as production company Fremantle. “From the beginning, [they] were giving us notes that weren’t constricting at all. They were actually really liberating,” the Emmy nominee explains. “They were saying, ‘No, go farther. Embarrass yourself. Go too far. Try to scare us. Try to see how far you can push it.’ And that kind of permission, I felt, even bled into the acting work on set because it came from the people who were in power who could make those decisions.”

    Bailey, also Emmy-nominated for her work in the series, is quick to express his gratitude for the “brilliant gay stories” starring straight actors that have come before — “I would never for a second wish that I hadn’t seen Brokeback Mountain or Gus Van Sant’s Milk and Cate Blanchett playing Carol,” he says — as well as even having the opportunity to star in Fellow Travelers.

    “Had this been made five, 10 years ago, I completely believe that I would have been able to play a straight lead before I would have been able to play gay. And that’s kind of wild,” acknowledging the changing tides in the industry. But he also notes, “The majority of awards go to straight actors playing gay because there’s this sense that that means that they’re somehow brave or that they’re mixing it up. And there is a bruise that, looking back now, there’s a very real — and has been — sense that there aren’t out gay men playing their experience,” he says. “These characters, of course they’re rich, of course they’re complicated, of course they’re exactly the sort of stories that you’d want to tell because it’s so complicated, so much pain, and there’s so much suffering, there’s much resilience and there’s much spirit in it.”

    That pain is on display throughout much of the series’ eight episodes as they contend with McCarthyism and restrictive laws against homosexuality. But in particular for Bomer, it was episode 7, “White Nights,” that he admits he was dreading the most. After a family tragedy leaves Hawk devastated, he flees to Fire Island, where his abuse of alcohol and drugs rightfully worries Tim, who travels there to find and hopefully help him.

    Bomer says his nerves were routed in the big emotion switch Hawk makes during a sexual escape. “I was gonna have to go from a really drug-fueled kind of bacchanalian love scene that’s really dark into the turning point for the character,” he explains. “He has this tragic secret that he’s trying to bury that is suddenly exposed in front of his face. And as Hawkins is want to do, when it’s exposed, he attacks. And then to go from that to being able to rely on my scene partner and fall into the complete vulnerability of the character for the first time — and we didn’t film those things separately, it was all one take — I knew that was going to be a scary day.”

    For everything Bailey experienced in the film, including the fear he had “of playing the last scenes” as Tim dies from complications of AIDS, it was a real-life scenario that reminded the actor of the horrors that queer people still experience. While in Washington D.C. for a Human Rights Campaign event in October 2023 prior to the launch of the series, Bailey, who was wearing an HRC hat, says a man in a coffee shop removed it from his head and threw it to the ground, physically threatening him before leaving when a woman started filming with her cellphone.

    “It was really overwhelming and upsetting,” Bailey recalls, noting the contrast between the “electric fervor” of the previous night’s celebratory event. “I woke up the next day and I honestly felt like I was in a sort of montage of a B-movie because I was like, the sun was out and I was like, this is it, this is it, I get it, I get what this is about, I can see what my platform is and I can see how I can use this. [And I] went into a coffee shop and then someone threatens you and says, ‘Get out of my country, you f—ing queer. If you don’t do that, I’ll shoot you.'”

    Within a week, he called Jonathan Anderson, creative director of luxury brand Loewe, to create the Drink Your Milk t-shirt — a line from Fellow Travelers — to raise money for oppressed LGBTQ+ people around the world via Bailey’s new foundation, the Shameless Fund.

    “It was the most activating thing that possibly could have happened,” Bailey says now, as Bomer wipes tears starting to well in his eyes. “There’s a love letter I should write to the man from Pennsylvania.”

    Entertainment Weekly

    written by Jasper August 23, 2024

    Matt Bomer Talks ‘White Collar’ Revival

    Matt also talked about the White Collar revival in a recent interview with People Magazine!

    If Matt Bomer could have his way, White Collar would get the revival it deserves.

    During a recent interview with PEOPLE, the actor, 46, discussed the reboot script written by co-creator Jeff Eastin.

    “It’s fantastic, and it’s completely in line and in keeping with the show that we were able to do six seasons of,” Bomer tells PEOPLE. “It really just feels like he was able to pick up the right where we left off.”

    “It’s a really intelligent, fun, organic way to bring all the characters back together to pay tribute to Willie Garson, Diahann Carroll and folks we’ve lost since the show ended, which was really important to me,” he continues. “It’s something that if you enjoyed the show, you really will have a good time watching it.”

    While a White Collar revival isn’t surefire thing yet — “Many of those decisions are above my pay grade and out of my control,” he says — Bomer is excited by the prospect of reprising the role of Neal Caffrey, the elusive criminal-turned-FBI consultant. He’s also thrilled to possibly reunite onscreen with Tim DeKay, who played Peter Burke, and Tiffani Thiessen, who portrayed Elizabeth Burke.

    “So much of that experience was just being with that group of people,” says Bomer, pointing out that DeKay remains a close friend. “We worked long hours on that show, and it never felt like work. It was just such a fun, free, open environment and a great place to just create and explore the characters.”

    White Collar, which for six seasons from 2009 to 2014, featured a cast that included Bomer, DeKay, Thiessen, Garson, who died in 2021 at age 57, and Carroll, who died in 2019 at age 84.

    In an interview with PEOPLE in February, Bomer remembered Garson, who played Neal’s close friend Mozzie.

    “I have only special memories of working with Willie,” Bomer said. “He made every day more fun. He made every day more funny. He certainly added color to any room he was in, any conversation he was in, and he was a beautiful actor to get to work with. … Whenever I looked in the call sheet and I said that I was going to have scenes with Mozzie, coming up that next week, I knew it was going to be a fun day at work.”

    In addition to White Collar, Bomer also discussed his role as Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller in Fellow Travelers, which earned him a 2024 Emmy nomination for outstanding lead actor in a limited or anthology series or movie.

    Hawk is a State Department official hiding his sexuality who is swept up in a decades-long relationship with Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey). She show spans from 1950s Joseph McCarthy communist trials to the 1980s AIDS crisis.

    “When I was nominated, I was so grateful and happy, obviously, but I was also mostly just grateful that a show like Fellow Travelers could exist in the world today, because we’ve all been around at a time when it couldn’t, and we could be on the precipice of a time when it couldn’t again,” he says. “So I’m just really thankful that we were able to get the show made.”

    People
    written by Jasper August 19, 2024

    Matt Bomer for Los Angeles Times

    Matt has a new interview with Los Angeles Times and discussed Fellow Travelers! From going through the book to seeing it made as a limited series adaptation, he shared his commitment throughout the journey. You can read it below if you’re getting paywalled. I have also added the two outtakes into our gallery! Hopefully there’s some more to come, it’s yet another pretty shoot.

    You were committed to this project from the start, long before there was even a deal in place. What drew you to such a big swing?

    I got through [the book] in a couple of days and just fell in love with the characters and the world of the piece. It was just a book at the time, but Ron had kind of given me bullet points as to what he planned to do with the show. I’ve always been a fan of his writing. He really understands dimension and light and shadow in characters, which is kind of essential for episodic [TV] in this day and age. It was one of those novels where I got an education without feeling like I was getting an education.

    Why do you think the series was ultimately green-lighted at Showtime?

    It was really Ron’s writing. It was so powerful and so kind of undeniable that I think they knew that they had something that could be really special.

    We were so grateful to partner with Showtime and Fremantle. These executives were giving the most brilliant notes. Normally, these notes are trying to curtail or make something smaller. But they were saying, “No, push it further, go all the way, and then we’ll see if you need to go back.” That’s just a dream scenario as a creative.

    Were you concerned that Hawk, who’s an often selfish and deceitful character, would be seen as too unsympathetic?

    No. I was so excited that there was an unsympathetic gay character in the lead. I’d been watching my fellow actors, whom I love and admire, play these hyper-nuanced, really seemingly unlikable, shadowy lead characters for years, and it was so nice to see a character from the LGBTQIA+ community written that way. But I think you’re always your character’s defense attorney.

    How did you approach playing such a complicated, dualistic guy?

    It’s impossible to be objective about it, even now. I always saw him as a survivor. The game he’s playing has the highest stakes possible, and if something’s going to compromise that, he’s going to make an executive decision that may not be the most likable, but it’s what he has to do to survive [in his world, at that time]. You’ve got to remember, he’s somebody who lived through a war and watched his entire platoon die. He understands life and death, and also living on the edge, in a way most of us can’t even fathom.

    Much has been made of the series’ frank and graphic sex scenes. Were there ever any times that you — or maybe you and Jonathan Bailey — felt like perhaps not quite as much “vividness” was needed? Or maybe even more?

    Honestly, I was just trying to be in the moment and not disassociate, which I’ve done in the past in scenes like that. But because the scenes were so acting-centric, and because Jonny and I had a comfort and trust with each other and knew each other’s boundaries, I feel like we were able to play in the moment and I could actually be present in my body.

    Still, there was a distinct purpose, an arc, if you will, to the sex scenes.

    The characters [Hawk and Tim] were never the same after those scenes as they were before, and I think that’s the mark of knowing when a scene like that is integral to the story. It was actually the one time in both of their lives when they could feel truly liberated, because of the different way they [each] responded to their social conditioning. They were able to find a kind of common therapeutic way to relate to each other in the bedroom that, in a strange way, allowed them both their moments of greatest freedom.

    Do you think the series is even more timely today than when you first read the source material?

    Yes. I’m just so grateful that a show like this can exist in our world. It’s so easy now to look around and see how fragile our democracy is and how quickly rights that we have are taken for granted — and can be taken away from us.

    Los Angeles Times
    written by Jasper June 07, 2024

    THR’s Drama Actors Roundtable

    Matt is part of The Hollywood Reporter’s 2024 Drama Actor Emmy roundtable, alongside Jon Hamm, David Oyelowo, Clive Owen, Callum Turner, and Nicholas Galitzine. Check out two outtakes and scans in our gallery, and their conversation below! There should be a video available soon, I will update this post when it’s released.

    What was the funniest or strangest feedback you’ve gotten or read about yourself?

    DAVID OYELOWO I once auditioned for a director, who, in the middle of the audition, said, “This isn’t working.” That was pretty bad.

    JON HAMM But also, turns out it was working. And it remains working.

    OYELOWO Yes.

    HAMM In a similar vein, I had a head of this television network tell my representatives, actually, that Jon Hamm will never be a television star.

    NICHOLAS GALITZINE How wrong they were.

    MATT BOMER Name names.

    GALITZINE Yeah, spill the tea.

    HAMM He’s no longer at the head of that network.

    BOMER I know exactly who it is.

    OYELOWO Why, did they say the same thing to you?

    BOMER Not far from it. (Laughter.)

    Does a comment like that sink you or motivate you?

    HAMM I think I heard about it much later in the history of things, because it was one of those things where I had auditioned for this person and this network over and over and over again, as one does, and for whatever reason didn’t get the part, and didn’t get the part, and didn’t get the part. It would always come down to the last two, me and the guy who’s going to get it. But it was one of those things. Steve Martin talks about it in his book, but auditioning is the worst. It just stinks, but that’s the only way we’ve got. And there’s so many variables that are completely out of your control, so the ability to let it go is an amazing point in one’s career. And then, of course, that’s when you don’t ever have to audition again.

    CALLUM TURNER I like auditioning.

    BOMER I do too.

    GALITZINE You do not. Really?

    CLIVE OWEN Do you?

    HAMM God bless you.

    OK, why do you like it?

    TURNER Because you get into the room, and you get a feel for the director and the people you are going to work with.

    HAMM But do you still do that? Everything’s on tape now, isn’t it?

    TURNER Yeah, I just auditioned the other day for something; it was nice to go in and to play. There was a crossover for me. I hated auditioning, and then one day I realized that they want you to get the part. They’re on your side — they’re not going to waste their time with you for no reason.

    OYELOWO I think it’s the stuff around it. It’s walking into a waiting room and seeing 10 versions of yourself.

    And it’s often the same people that you’re auditioning against.

    GALITZINE Yeah, over and over, “Good to see you again.”

    OYELOWO And sometimes you have that terrible setup where you can hear everyone.

    GALITZINE You go, “I should’ve done it like that!”

    OYELOWO Or I think, “I’m going to go in there and everyone’s going to be listening to me.” And then it’s going home, and the self-loathing, and the anticipation, and the, “Did I get it? Did I not?” The waiting, and all of that. So, it’s the stuff around auditioning that can be really challenging.

    Nicholas, your Idea of You co-star Anne Hathaway did say recently that you could have chemistry with a lamp, which could qualify as strange or funny feedback.

    GALITZINE It’s true. I’ve been getting a lot of vibes.

    TURNER I saw him earlier. The lamp was flickering.

    GALITZINE Watch out, it’s very potent. (Laughs.) Honestly, that was an amazing audition experience where I had a very conducive room, and it makes all the difference. You come out of it with like this performance high.

    TURNER Mm-hmm.

    GALITZINE It’s less feedback, as much as it was the look of horror on the casting director’s face. But when I went into audition for young Tarzan, there were no lines, and I was told that I had to pretend that I had an orange that someone was trying to steal from me and I had to guard it. And you know when you don’t go for something entirely, and it just seems very feeble and pathetic and wrong? That is a moment that keeps me awake at night. I think about it a lot.

    So, it was motivating for you?

    GALITZINE You could say that.

    HAMM You’ll never eat an orange again. (Laughter.)

    OYELOWO But that chemistry thing is a real thing. If you get to do chemistry reads, which is something I do love doing because there’s an excitement as to, “Is this going to be the person I’m going to get to do this with?” But when it doesn’t work, when the chemistry isn’t there, oh my Lord. Because there’s an alchemy to it, and you can’t quite put your finger on why something works or it doesn’t, and you know within seconds.

    And then you see these actresses again. Is that awkward?

    OYELOWO Yeah. (Laughter.) I’m thinking of one experience in particular, and I’m not going to mention who it is, but it was so not the right fit. And you can feel it in the room, palpably, to a comedic degree, actually, to the point where it’s a coming-up-in-hives thing. I definitely had that with that experience.

    OWEN It’s better to find out then than —

    HAMM Week two.

    OYELOWO Yeah, which is why you do it.

    Looking back at your careers, what?felt, at the time, like the biggest risk?

    OYELOWO I remember being at a time in my career where I just felt like I wasn’t being challenged enough. I went into my agency, I said this, then the next thing that hit my doormat was a film called Nightingale. It was just me, in a house, having killed my mother. Eighty pages with no one else. And that was as terrified as I’ve ever been, so be careful what you wish for. And, yeah, it was a risk, but it was definitely one that paid off.

    TURNER And there’s no way that you can’t be scared, either. It’s such a vulnerable thing.

    HAMM For sure.

    TURNER Sometimes I’ve laid by myself and stared at my ceiling and thought, “What am I doing?” just before something’s about to come out.

    BOMER Oh, yeah.

    TURNER It’s real fear. It’s crippling. But then it’s also the thing that pushes you on, it’s the thing that makes you get back out there, because it’s thrilling at the same time. I just don’t want to be laughed at. That’s my fear, really.

    It’s interesting to be able to identify what exactly the fear is. Can the rest of you do that?

    BOMER Oh, I feel like I don’t want to let folks down.

    GALITZINE Yeah, that’s a big one.

    OWEN And it doesn’t matter how much you’ve done. Every time you go into a new thing, the potential to fail is hovering around — the potential to not actually do it as well as you hope you can, is always there. It never goes away.

    Clive, early in your career, you were on a very popular television show, and at its height, you decided to pivot and take a role in a movie that, I believe, surprised people.

    OWEN I got into acting because I wanted to play different parts. And very young, I landed this big TV show called Chancer, which got a lot of heat, and then I started to get offered a lot of stuff like that. Mainstream TV. And even at that very young age, I was very aware that I wanted a long career, but a career that was as varied as possible. And then this writer-director came to me with Close My Eyes, which was about an incestuous relationship with a brother and sister, very delicate, very beautifully written, and I remember at that time thinking, “It’s hugely important I do this because I just don’t want to follow this one thing.” That impetus has been with me ever since. And sometimes it can be a hugely scary, challenging thing, but the worst thing that can happen is you’ll be bad. I’ve been bad before. I’ll be bad again.

    Does the team around you try to talk you out of these choices?

    OWEN I have never listened to anybody else. Ultimately, you are the one who has to go to work every day. I do what I want to do because that’s what’s going to sustain me through it.

    read more
    written by Jasper April 14, 2024

    Deadline Contenders Television 2024

    Matt attended the Deadline Contenders Television last night with Fellow Travelers co-star Jonathan Bailey and series creator Ron Nyswaner. A panel was also held at the event, where they talked about their characters, how the show was created, and more. Visit our gallery for photos of Matt at the event! You can also watch the panel below.


    written by Jasper December 20, 2023

    Matt Bomer for The New York Times

    Matt is featured in The New York Times and he discussed his career, from starting out to taking on lead roles. If you’re not able to access the full article on their website due to paywall, you can read it below, more under the cut! Hopefully more photos from the shoot comes out soon too.

    In 2001, the actor Matt Bomer took a role in “Guiding Light.” He had resisted it at first. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s vaunted musical theater program, he felt that a soap opera was beneath him. But a few theater jobs hadn’t gone anywhere, and he had recently lost a bellman gig at a midtown hotel, so when the chance came up to play Ben Reade, a trust fund baby turned sex worker, he signed on.

    Bomer had been afraid of being on camera. “I was terrified of anybody seeing that close to my soul,” he said. On the soap, he learned to say his lines, hit his marks, make a choice and stick to it. The camera left his soul alone.

    In 2002, he asked the producers to write him off. He had been told that he was the director’s choice for a major new superhero movie. Then, he believes, the movie’s producers discovered that he was gay. That movie was never made.

    Bomer has never been sure if that’s why the project fell apart. Like marriages and dishwashers, movies in preproduction have many ways to fail. Still, he took from the experience a painful lesson. He couldn’t be himself and have the career he wanted. Around the same time, a producer (Bomer didn’t name him) told him that if he came out publicly, he would never play leads.

    It took 20 years, but Bomer, 46, has proved that producer wrong. He can currently be seen in two major projects: the Netflix film “Maestro,” which came to Netflix on Wednesday, and the Showtime romantic drama “Fellow Travelers,” set during and after the Lavender Scare of the 1950s, in which gay men and women were denied and purged from government jobs.

    In the series, which concluded last week, Bomer plays Hawkins Fuller, a state department operative with a promising career, a loving wife and a passionate entanglement with a man, played by Jonathan Bailey (“Bridgerton”). Driven, magnetic, emotionally opaque, Fuller — Hawk to his intimates — has all the signifiers of a prestige drama antihero. His is a leading role. Bomer, playing him, is a leading man.

    “Before this I was like, why can’t we have our Don Draper? Why can’t we have our Walter White?” Bomer said. “I don’t think I could have done it if I hadn’t worked on all the projects leading up to it.”

    Bomer grew up in Spring, Tex., a suburb of Houston. His family went to church several times a week, and that church considered homosexuality an abomination, so Bomer spent much of his childhood and adolescence running from himself. In high school, he participated in forensics, football, student council, Latin Club. “Anything that kept me busy,” he said. He also acted, landing his first professional job at 18. In theater, inside the skin of a character, he felt free.

    He began to date men in college, during a year abroad in Ireland. A decade into his career, once he had recurred on several series, co-starred in a Jodie Foster movie (“Flightplan”) and was firmly ensconced as the breezy lead of the USA cop-and-con-man procedural “White Collar,” he came out while receiving a humanitarian award, in 2012. He was already married then, to the publicist Simon Halls, and the father of three young boys.

    Bomer isn’t sure that it was an ideal time to come out. “White Collar” was still airing, and the first “Magic Mike” film, in which he plays one of the exotic dancers, would soon premiere. But he was tired of running. And he was happy.

    “I just thought, I don’t want to hide this,” he recalled on a recent morning. “Love is more important to me than anything that being my true self cost me.”

    We had met an hour earlier in the middle of a West Village street. The plan had been to walk around the neighborhood, Bomer’s favorite in the city. (Although he is based in Los Angeles, he and Halls have an apartment nearby.) But it was near freezing, so after a few moments we ducked into the glassed-in back room of a pastry shop on Bleecker Street.

    I can confirm that if you are a person who enjoys the company of handsome men, it is very nice to sip herbal tea across the table from Bomer. He has dark hair, light eyes, a jaw so square it could be used for geometry tutorials. Wrap that up in an off-white turtleneck sweater, and it’s heartthrob city. I had mentioned to a few friends that I would be meeting him, and they all wanted me to ask the same question: How does it feel to be that handsome?

    Bomer doesn’t discount his looks, but he has the decency to be mildly embarrassed by them. “We were raised in my home to always be very humble and to not be worldly in that regard,” he said. “Having said that, I make sure to moisturize.” He favors writers and directors who see him as more than a pretty face and sculpted abs. And there is more: impishness, candor, a sense of wounds long healed.

    “There’s a real sort of confident vulnerability about Matt,” said Bailey, his “Fellow Travelers” co-star.

    Coming out altered Bomer’s professional trajectory, though it didn’t necessarily diminish it. “I mean, there are certain rooms that I haven’t been in since,” he said. “But I think my career became so much richer.”

    As “White Collar” wound down, he took on several gay roles. He appeared in Dustin Lance Black’s “8,” a play about the overturning of the amendment banning same-sex marriage in California. He followed that with turns in Ryan Murphy’s film adaptations of “The Normal Heart” and “The Boys in the Band,” both seminal works of gay theater.

    In casting Bomer in “The Normal Heart,” Murphy recalled thinking: “Maybe this is the role that can show the world what Matt can do. I remember saying to him, ‘I can tell you can do this because you have a lot to prove.’” He also perceived that Bomer, an actor who had always relied on technique and charm, who had seen performance as one more way to hide, had a deep emotional well to draw from.

    “He knows what it’s like to struggle, and he knows what it’s like to be afraid, and he knows what it’s like to have people not believe in you,” Murphy said.

    Even as he played these gay roles, he continued on with straight ones, building a résumé that would not have been available to an out actor even a decade before. Murphy cast him opposite Lady Gaga in a season of “American Horror Story,” and he appeared as a Hollywood producer in a miniseries version of “The Last Tycoon.” He also filmed a second “Magic Mike” movie.

    Three and a half years ago, he read “Fellow Travelers,” the Thomas Mallon novel on which the series is based, with an eye toward starring in the adaptation. He was interested, but he didn’t really expect it to go forward. “There was a central part of me that has been in the business since I was 18, thinking, ‘Are the gatekeepers really going to give this the budget that it needs?’” he recalled.

    But the gatekeepers did. Ron Nyswaner, the showrunner of the series, wanted Bomer for the lead, intuiting that he could play both what Hawk shows to the world (charisma, ambition) and what he conceals (heart, desire, anguish).

    “Matt, for all his physical attractiveness and charm, he understands emotional pain,” Nyswaner said.

    When I asked Bomer what of himself he had given to Hawk, in terms of both effort and personal experience, his answer was simple: “Everything.” Finally, he is letting the camera see into his soul. In most scenes, Bomer plays two or three emotions simultaneously, some across the surface of his face and others roiling underneath. The show includes several unusually intimate sex scenes, and Bomer gave himself to these, too. With the consent of his co-star and an intimacy coordinator, he even improvised a few unscripted moments, as when Hawk licks a lover’s armpit.

    “I feel like I’ve been watching straight people express their sexuality in front of me my entire life,” Bomer said. “Now you can watch some of our experience onscreen.”

    If Bomer has his way, there will be more to watch. He appears in Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro,” as the clarinetist and producer David Oppenheim, a colleague and lover of Leonard Bernstein’s. And there are plans for other series: a queer espionage drama, an adaptation of another novel. (His dream project is a “Murder She Wrote” reboot.) Then of course there are his other roles: husband, father, son, brother, advocate and activist for human rights.

    Bailey, who is a decade younger, described him as “a blinding light — a good blinding light! — of energy and commitment.” Bomer was someone he had looked to as he navigated his own career, a man who had nudged open a door and kept it open for others who came after. “He’s a beacon,” Bailey said.

    Predictably, Bomer takes a humbler approach. His concern is for what he has received, not what he might provide. His life has taken him, he said, from an industry suspicious of queer storytelling to one more receptive. From running from himself to settling down with a family and faith rooted in love and acceptance. Another man might discount the earlier years — the division, the prejudice, the pain — but Bomer doesn’t. It has made him who he is: a leading man and a man now able to take the lead in his own life.

    “I’m grateful, ultimately, that I got to see both sides,” he said.

    The New York Times
    written by Jasper December 14, 2023

    Matt on ‘The Kelly Clarkson Show’

    This is a late-ish update because the better-quality stills were released just today. Matt made an appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show last week to promote Fellow Travelers. He also talked about his kids staging an intervention for him for Christmas this year, how Rock Hudson has inspired him, and more. Check out a clip of his interview below!

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