Pee-wee Herman is back with his new feature film “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday,” now streaming on Netflix. It’s almost as if he never went away, because you can play the new movie back-to-back with Tim Burton’s 1985 debut “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” and the child-like imp of a character doesn’t seem to have aged one single day.
Pee-wee’s latest project began with producer Judd Apatow seeing his stint on Broadway and urging him (or rather, his alter ego, comedian Paul Reubens) to write a script with Paul Rust, whose own show “Love” is also airing on Netflix.
Possibly the strangest new friend Pee-wee makes in his latest adventure is none other than Joe Manganiello from “True Blood” and the “Magic Mike” movies, who invites Pee-wee to visit him in New York City.
“I met him at a party about six years ago and he was really a super Pee-wee freak, just a real fan,” Reubens tells us about how that relationship began. “Joe is a super-nice, sensitive, giving and wonderful person and it was very organic. Our friendship began a little bit like in the movie. We just decided,‘We like each other, we’re going to be friends’ right away.”
“I feel like it’s the biggest revelation in the whole movie,” he adds about Manganiello’s contributions. “Joe approached it so seriously from such an actor’s standpoint, and he brought such an enormous sweetness to it. I’m floored by his performance; I feel like he steals the movie and that’s fine with me.”
“I tend to filter everything that goes on with me outside of the writing room through what project I’m working on,” Reubens says about coming up with some of the crazier gags for “Big Holiday” “A lot of times I’ll just think of something or experience something and go, ‘This is how this can connect to the movie I’m writing.’
“I’m a control freak so I look around for the exact person to make it happen and then stay on them all the time,” he elaborates. “From the standpoint of production design or props or what something looks like, I’m pretty involved in all that.”
Otherwise, Reubens prefers not to delve too deeply into the specifics of his method of becoming Pee-wee Herman or why the character is still so beloved and feels so timeless after decades.
“I try not to get into most of that stuff,” he says. “A lot of it is more gut or whatever comes into my brain, but in terms of why does Pee-wee work or those kinds of things, I just try really hard not to focus on that stuff. I get a certain joy from what I do that would start to diminish if I had to dissect it. It’s just really gratifying when people like it and appreciate it.”
