Matt Bomer Discusses ‘Fellow Travelers’ And The Rise Of Queer Stories

“I have been on television for 23 years now,” Matt Bomer told me.

The beloved actor sure has come a long way since his early jobs on shows like the long-lived soap All My Children and Tru Calling, a short-lived series that he excitingly recalls receiving his SAG card on. His breakthrough acting role came in 2009 when he was cast as the star of White Collar, playing the charismatic con artist-turned-FBI operative Neal Caffrey for six seasons.

From there, Bomer became even more of a household name with his performances in Glee, Magic Mike, The Normal Heart, American Horror Story, The Sinner, The Boys In The Band and Doom Patrol. His latest project is the Showtime original series Fellow Travelers, where he plays State Department official Hawkins Fuller (often referred to as Hawk) during a time in the 1950s when the U.S. government went to extreme measures to uncover and prosecute homosexuals.

Bomer not only co-stars on Fellow Travelers alongside Jonathan Bailey as Tim Laughlin, he is also an executive producer on the new series. Based on the 2007 book by Thomas Mallon and brought to the screen by show creator Ron Nyswaner, some of the main characters may be fictionalized, but the historical events surrounding them were quite real.

Bomer said, “I think I read the book in three days after they brought the material to me, and it was a world I’d never seen before. It was educational – it was a part of our history I had no clue about. I heard Pete Buttigieg mention it once on a talk show, but I knew nothing about the specifics of what had gone on with [Senator Joseph] McCarthy and [prosecuting chief counsel Roy] Cohn convincing [President Dwight] Eisenhower to sign this executive measure to basically eliminate any queer people from government. Also, the relationship dynamics between Hawk and Tim were unlike anything I had ever seen on-screen, so I thought, ‘Wow!’ And Hawk was such a multi-dimensional character. He was kind of a queer anti-hero, which you don’t come across those very often, so I just thought it would be a fascinating role to get the opportunity to play.”

Throughout this eight-episode arc of Fellow Travelers, with a new episode premiering weekly on Showtime, the story spans across four decades to showcase the long and rather complicated love story between Hawk and Tim, from their early years together in secrecy during the 1950s through the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

Being an openly gay man himself, I asked Bomer what parts of his Fellow Travelers character did he identify with and what parts of Hawk did he really have to dig deep to find as an actor.

“Well, growing up in a smaller town in a very conservative part of the Bible Belt in Texas – a very Friday Night Lights town, which has since become pretty progressive actually, but when I was growing up there, it certainly didn’t feel that way. Particularly in high school, I felt like the stakes were pretty life and death for me, in terms of my sexuality, so I understood Hawk’s world and the need to be able to maneuver in the world and try to succeed in the world and kind of win in an ultimate ‘F You’ to a society that did not support him or want him to succeed in any way.”

Bomer added, “I understood the stakes of how important it was to me to compartmentalize my life or bifurcate my life when I was a young person, until I could go to drama school when I was 18 and sort of find my tribe and become a little bit more of an authentic version of myself. What I love about Hawk and what was different between Hawk and I is that I try to do it by being a good guy and having some success. Hawk does it by being a bad guy. He lets out his inner-bad boy. He’s not afraid to act on all those impulses and I think he has a much more clear-cut, complicated, angry relationship with his father, with God, with government, with society, that he’s able to be a little bit more of a rebel about. I think there’s something that’s really admirable about that.”

With Bomer’s co-star Bailey coming off of his rather newfound stardom on the popular Bridgerton series and soon will be sharing his performance as Fiyero in the two-part film adaptation of Wicked, Bailey plays government worker Tim in Fellow Travelers, a young man who is completely enamored by Hawk, while conflicted with his feelings from his strong religious beliefs. Together, Bomer and Bailey bring a beautifully intimate and often intense chemistry to their outstanding performances on-screen.

Bomer said, “Jonathan is a profoundly gifted actor and I knew that going into the piece, so I knew I had a scene partner who I could trust and be inspired by and collaborate with. We sat down for a coffee at Goldstruck Coffee on Cumberland Avenue in Toronto a little bit before we started filming and we just acknowledged the story we were going to attempt to tell over the next five and a half months, or whatever it was. We just pretty much made a pact that we would look out for each other and have each other’s backs, so I think we brought that ethos to set, and the writing is so rich and so strong. I think what we wanted to do was try to find the relationship and find the characters dynamic with each other while the camera was rolling, instead of over-rehearsing it or trying to overly-choreograph anything. We really wanted it to be happening for the first time on-screen.”

Being a driving force in front of the camera and as an executive producer on Fellow Travelers, I wondered what joys Bomer is getting out of his work behind the scenes that he does not perhaps get out of his acting work.

“That’s a great question,” Bomer said. “I think anything that I can contribute to in any regard to help hopefully put it on the path to being made and having an opportunity for a story to be told is really exciting for me, especially if it’s something like Fellow Travelers that I really believe in. There’s a project that I’m producing with Steven Soderbergh right now about Lawrence v. Texas, so when things like that come across my plate and I have the opportunity to try give them a leg up in the industry, if I can, that’s really exciting to me.”

As Bomer starts to set his sights beyond Fellow Travelers, with his future aspirations and with the SAG-AFTRA strike now over, he went on to tell me that he feels hopeful and excited about the future of Hollywood, especially “the amount of queer content that is coming out of our entertainment community right now.” He took a moment to praise the success of the recently released Red, White & Royal Blue on Prime Video and the momentum behind Searchlight Pictures’ All of Us Strangers, saying that industry “gatekeepers are really getting behind this type of content and giving queer creators a chance to tell their stories.”

He added, “I’m so grateful to SAG-AFTRA that they got the deal that they did. I certainly feel a lot more optimistic because of the deal they got. I know that was challenging and difficult for a lot of people, and I acknowledge that. My heart mostly went out to ‘below the line’ folks, a lot of whom are my friends who were really struggling. My hope is that with a deal in place, we can all feel secure going forward and get back to work as soon as possible.”

Fellow Travelers is not the only project right now that Bomer is receiving a lot of positive attention towards – he also stars alongside Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan in the Netflix film Maestro, which tells the true story around the life of famed composer Leonard Bernstein. In Maestro, Bomer plays David Oppenheim, a fellow musician, close friend and somewhat secret love interest to Bernstein. With Cooper not only starring but directing the project, Bomer looks back on his experience on Maestro with nothing but praise for Cooper.

“I hope that every actor has the gift of working with Bradley Cooper as a director. He’s profoundly gifted – he’s an electric talent. He really is so in charge of his craft, both as an actor and a director – and it’s not ego-based. It’s all in service of the story, and watching him essentially direct Maestro while in character as Leonard Bernstein and then jumping right into the scenes and finding ways to keep them fresh and dynamic and new each time, it was just one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen – been a part of.”

Bomer added about Cooper, “When he’s in a scene with you, he only wants you to be great. He only wants you to shine. I think that’s part of the reason why he’s so good because he’s so generous. In a way, it can free him up to do all the brilliant things that he does.”

With both Fellow Travelers and Maestro now under his belt, what types of roles and stories is Bomer most interested in finding and taking on next?

“I feel like I’ve been so fortunate that creators and writers have taken risks on me, and for whatever reason, sometimes seen things in me that I can’t even see in myself and expressed their confidence in me playing challenging roles that aren’t like anything I’ve done before. I’m so grateful for that and I hope to continue in that. I think there’s something really exciting when you get a role or you read a role and you think, ‘Gosh, this is an unbelievable part’ like I did with Hawk – but at the same time, you’re going, ‘Can I do this? I don’t know if I can pull this off.’ I hope that I get the opportunity to continue to challenge myself.”

Bomer also expressed to me that he thinks there is often a misconception that “I always have like 40 opportunities as an actor – and I don’t. I really in many ways kind of have more or less taken what I’ve been given and enjoyed that very much.”

In-between work prospects, Bomer has been quietly pushing along a few project ideas of his own, including a project that he hopes to create called Cabot Cove, which lives within the same fictional universe as the Angela Lansbury-led series Murder, She Wrote.

Bomer said of his idea, “I play Jessica Fletcher’s estranged grandson, who inherits her home in Cabot Cove. There’s a whole big, overarching mythology too, but he discovers one of her old writings or journals and decides that he’s going to solve a case that she could never solve.”

Outside of work, Bomer has been married to his husband Simon Halls since 2011 and they have three sons together via surrogacy. When I asked Bomer what brings him the most joy in his life today, he playfully said with a laugh, “I feel really lucky that I can say it’s our kids because they’re all teenagers now and I can still say that it’s them. I think it’s a joy to hear about their lives and what’s going on with them and be a part of a family. I think that’s an amazing, miraculous thing and I love our boys very much.”

He added, “Outside of that, and I think this probably started during the [Covid-19] pandemic, it’s really getting out in nature. I appreciate the simple things now, far more than I ever did when I was younger. I feel like I’m in a place in my life where I stop and smell the roses for the first time, literally and figuratively.”

With both of Bomer’s latest characters in Fellow Travelers and Maestro being men of a certain time who could not live and love openly within society, I wondered what message Bomer would say to Hawk and David, if only he could, after embodying them on-screen and understanding their stories.

Bomer said, “I would say I’m sorry for what you had to put yourself through – what society put you through as a man, in terms of trying to be your most authentic self. I empathize with you, I thank you for trying to be the most authentic self you could be in the world you were living in and I hope you know that it gets better. Whether you can believe it or not, part of the reason it gets better is because of people like you and the people you’ve loved.”

I concluded my conversation with Bomer by turning that question back on him. If he could go back to the Matt Bomer who had just graduated from Carnegie Mellon University and decided to move to New York in hopes of becoming a working actor, what would the Matt Bomer today like to say to that up-and-coming Matt, after everything that he has embodied, experienced and achieved up to this point in his life.

“Oh gosh,” Bomer said. “As much as I would want him to be able to avoid some of the difficulties and the painful things that he experienced, they were also extremely necessary for him to become the person and the actor that he is. So, I think I would just say it’s all going to be okay. Take care of yourself. Do your best to try and love yourself and the people around you and be a good person, and just know that it’s all going to be okay.”