photographs by Nadia Lee Cohen
(director of photography Andrew Goeser)
photo assistance by Gustavo Soriano
styling by Chloe & Chenelle
tailoring by Oxana Sumenko
makeup by Ve Neill (for Paul Reubens)
& Lilly Keys @ A-Frame Agency (for Nadia Lee Cohen)
hair by Sami Knight @ A-Frame Agency
special thanks to Allison Berry, David Owen, Dream Factory Studios, Edge EQ Rentals, and Uncle Paulie’s Deli

Paul Reubens is one of the most brilliant comedic talents of our era. His character, Pee-wee Herman, a maniacal man child with a famous red bowtie, hypernasality, and a predilection for mischief, is a Saturday morning cartoon come to life. Invented on the stage of The Groundlings, Pee-wee Herman is equally iconic and archetypal as Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp. Socially defective with the decency to wear a suit, both characters are rife with hilarious contradictions, and both characters are perfect representations of their respective zeitgeists. Whereas the Tramp was a silent and prophetic emblem of the forthcoming economic devastation of two global wars, Pee-wee may as well have been a louder-than-bombs manifestation of the late-capitalistic dreamscape of the 1980s. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (Tim Burton’s directorial debut) and later Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which aired on CBS and saw an average of ten million viewers per episode, was a fantasy of talking furniture in a supersaturated world that harkened back to 1950s diners and primetime dance competitions, a satirization of Post-War Americana as a frenzied pastiche. This pastiche was a siren call for rising artist and photographer Nadia Lee Cohen, who also trades in the currency of alter egos and the milieu of consumerist reverie through the lens of humor. Raised in the English countryside, a self-professed wild child, the technicolor stagecraft of Hollywood had an irresistible allure. Her solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, which was an unabashed sensation, included two large bodies of work from two sold out monographs published by IDEA Books. Women includes over 100 portraits of a diverse cast of female characters fictionalized by Cohen, at work and at play, all under the banner of Los Angeles’ disparate socio-economic milieu. Reminiscent of movie stills, the images are freeze frames in moments of action, repose, or seductive enchantment. In her most recent series,  HELLO, My Name Is, Nadia utilizes extensive prosthetics and makeup to embody a vast array of characters inspired by found corporate name tags—each character has an invented story, thoughts, dreams, and desires. It is a Hitchcockian character study of self-portraiture. Jean Baudrillard talked about this escape from the self in an age of simulation and hyperreality: "Never to be oneself, but never to be alienated: to enter from the outside into the form of the other." Both Paul Reubens and Nadia Lee Cohen take immense pleasure in this metamorphosis. Currently in production is a two-part HBO documentary on the life of Paul Reubens, directed by Matt Wolf (Spaceship Earth) and produced by the Safdie Brothers. In a time of shapeshifting realities and alternative facts, a time when we don’t even recognize the reflection in our mirrors, what can two masters of disguise teach us about who we really are?  

PAUL REUBENS Should we talk a little bit about how we met?  

NADIA LEE COHEN I knew you way before you knew anything about me. I used to do your Tequila dance for relatives when they came over. 

PAUL REUBENS I remember seeing you on Instagram. The more I saw, the more I was like, I have to know who this person is. And then, didn't I write you a note on Instagram?  

NADIA LEE COHEN Yes, you did. You shared something of mine and I thought it was a mistake. Tell me about growing up in Sarasota, [Florida] I Googled it last night. When did your fantasy world begin?  

PAUL REUBENS Well, my fantasy world began way before Sarasota because we moved there when I was in fourth grade. I was already obsessed with show business and wanted to be an actor when I was just a little kid. But I also watched a lot of television. That’s what really made me want to become an actor. I watched a lot of American shows like the Mickey Mouse Club, and there was a marionette named Howdy Doody that I loved so much. And then I Love Lucy. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Somehow, I just recognized, without knowing it, what a clown she was.  

NADIA LEE COHEN People always ask about the connection of where I grew up in relation to why I’m inspired by what I’m inspired by. I really have to rack my brain for answers. Having that question repeated made me realize there’s a chance I've been lying all this time and only recently realized it’s probably just down to the color palette, which is a mass of wet green and muddy brown. That's all I saw for maybe fifteen years, and I think that caused me to become excited by things like signage and food packaging; which eventually led me to America and all things American. 

PAUL REUBENS That makes sense to me too. As an infant—or almost an infant—I remember being obsessed by wallpaper, my blanket, and patterns. For me, it was patterns.  

NADIA LEE COHEN  Patterns or color. I watched cartoons like Tom and Jerry or Ren and Stimpy, things like that. And a British show called Bill and Ben. When I think back to those, I remember the pattern and color rather than the narrative. 

PAUL REUBENS  Sarasota, Florida was the winter headquarters of the Ringling Brothers Circus. So, when you would go to the grocery store, you could tell who all the circus people were. They were just dressed differently. 

NADIA LEE COHEN I'm imagining the fat lady and the bearded lady buying eggs. 

PAUL REUBENS There was an adjacent community where all the sideshow people lived.  

NADIA LEE COHEN Why? Because they were outcasts?  

PAUL REUBENS Yeah. They lived in a different community.  

NADIA LEE COHEN  So, who were you seeing?  

PAUL REUBENS This is a long time ago, and this wouldn't be that uncommon now, but you would see somebody with dyed red hair or fishnet stockings. You would go, oh, wow, there's a circus performer. That seemed like show business. That's the closest I had been to real show business. We would see them all over town. And we lived near some circus people. So, for a while I just thought, maybe this is my calling.  

NADIA LEE COHEN I was a tomboy, didn't brush my hair and was always covered in mud, cuts, and bruises. The farm we grew up in was kind of a building site, my dad was slowly doing it up. I had this little quad bike and I'd just roam around everywhere saving animals till the sun went down. There was this nasty disease the rabbits got in England called myxomatosis. It would make them go blind and mangey. So, I used to go around collecting them which is probably pretty unhygienic. They'd all eventually die, so sad but probably taught me a lot about death. There were also these cages around the fields where pheasants were trapped for the local gentry to shoot on the weekend. I used to free them too. One day the gamekeeper knocked at the door and told my dad “If your daughter keeps this shit up I’ll shoot her.” 

PAUL REUBENS I was waiting for you to bring up your dad. I wanted to talk about dads for one minute, because I feel like our dads have a bit in common and probably had a lot to do with how we turned out. You posted some pictures of your dad and he looked so amazing. He was on a motorcycle and he looked like a rebel. And my father was really like that too. 

NADIA LEE COHEN Tell me about him.  

PAUL REUBENS Well, my father and four other Americans started the Israeli Air Force in 1947. There’s a documentary about it. But I grew up not really having very much context for his stories and feeling like they were all exaggerated. I didn't realize it was him and just four other people. I just thought it was a whole big thing with lots of people. And so my father was like Indiana Jones. And I got this vibe that your dad was like that too.  

NADIA LEE COHEN That’s incredible, I think I knew parts of that but I also didn’t realize it was just him and four other guys. My dad doesn’t like rules and I think I inherited that. My mom was married to somebody in the band Supertramp before I was born, they split and she fled to a kibbutz in Israel, which is apparently what the majority of 18-to-30-year-olds were doing in the 1970s. That’s where she met my dad. He just rode up to her on his motorbike, smoking with a red hoodie on. He was a rebel and always in trouble. He couldn't speak any English, so they couldn't actually converse for years. She brought him back to England and they're still together.  

PAUL REUBENS Every detail of that sounds fantastic. 

NADIA LEE COHEN  And the best thing is it’s recorded. My dad has such amazing documentation of his childhood, teens, and early manhood. He and his friends all chipped in to buy a camera when they were really young. Which was a big deal as they were dirt poor—like stealing-eggs-from-the-neighbors kind of poor. 

PAUL REUBENS  Going back to rules, and I have a feeling that we had this in common—I think one of many things I got from my dad was, do not tell me no about something. If you tell me that something can't be done, that's like a challenge to me. I'm like, oh I will figure that out. Don't you have that? 

NADIA LEE COHEN  Oh, 100%. Definitely. My mom says I have that, and maybe I got it from her. Her dad told her to ‘never call anyone sir’ which I love as a life sentiment. I wanted to ask about your father building a stage for you? 

PAUL REUBENS  I'm so happy you brought that up because I know that your father also built you a stage. When I was a kid, we lived in upstate New York—this was before we moved to Florida, so I must have been like five or six years old. One day my father came in and said that he would build something in the basement for both my sister and I—whatever we wanted. My sister wanted a pirate ship, so he built her a pirate ship. And I wanted a stage, so he built me a stage. I would do the craziest stuff on the stage. I became very popular in our neighborhood with older kids who would use me to get to the stage. They would put on shows and give me a bit part. One of them was a sci-fi play where I got pushed offstage into a vat of acid—that was my whole part. My father and I would go to these novelty stores in New York City and I would get to choose one thing to buy, and I would always buy something for my stage. One time, I bought this fake grass mat, very small.  I would put that on the stage and sit with my legs to the side, like a fawn, and I would turn on the blue light. It was like a tableau, like I was in the woods and I was some kind of animal in repose.  

NADIA LEE COHEN  Was there an audience?  

PAUL REUBENS  No, I would do it by myself (laughs). I was pretty young to be like, let me just be as weird as I can be today, but that's kind of what it was. 

NADIA LEE COHEN My stage was above the garage. It was a time when I was really obsessed with the reverse dream sequence in Twin Peaks. You know with the zigzag floor and red curtain? I asked my parents to help me make it, and one day I came home from school and they’d made it. My dad had put up the curtain and built the stage and my mom hand-painted the zigzags. It’s still there, only now my parents have a Polish lodger who lives in the flat above the garage and works out in the Twin Peaks area (laughs). I feel like David Lynch would be very into the visual of a buff little Polish guy lifting weights in that set. 

PAUL REUBENS Another obvious thing that we have in common is that we both deal in alter egos. That's where we overlap. But, I only really have one alter ego. I mean, being an actor in movies, you get to play an alter ego, but it's a scripted thing. You're co-creating something that somebody else wrote and conceived. Whereas you just go from scratch.  

NADIA LEE COHEN  Do you find you're less self-conscious when dressed as somebody else? I find I have this freedom in not caring what I look like because they don't care about what they look like. Character gives me a certain confidence I don't have as Nadia.  

PAUL REUBENS  Absolutely. That’s part of the allure and the glamor of alter egos. You hide behind them or disappear into them. 

NADIA LEE COHEN  I wonder if it has something to do with being insecure in yourself. Did you have a difficult upbringing with any bullying?  

PAUL REUBENS I didn't really. I mean, I was an oddball kid, but it didn't really affect me that much. I remember my first day of school, when we moved to Florida, I showed up in a full beachcomber outfit. I had cutoff pirate pants and a rope belt. My mother took us shopping and we got to pick out whatever we wanted. I have to give it to my parents. They were never like, “Are you kidding? Are you crazy? No, you can't wear that.” She'd be like, “Go ahead.” So I showed up in the craziest outfits and the kids in school were all like, “What the hell are you supposed to be?”  

NADIA LEE COHEN  Were they into it? 

PAUL REUBENS No, they weren't at all. They made fun of me. But instead of saying to myself, “Oh my God, I've made a huge mistake.” I was more like, “What part of this don't you guys get? I'm a Beachcomber. We're in Florida. Are you insane?” And the next day I went to school in the same outfit—just different color pirate pants and shirt. 

NADIA LEE COHEN On my first day of high school I decided to have two Princess Leia buns. My skirt was extremely long whilst everybody else's was very short. And I had these shoes that my mom bought because they came with a free watch. They were big and clunky. So I turned up looking like a real target. And also, at eleven, I was the height I am now—I used to stand with my hip dropped down to make myself shorter. Around a month into school I piled on makeup, tanned my skin terracotta and bleached my hair and eyebrows in order to successfully morph into the ‘Essex Girl’ I noticed was popular. I fully went for it.  

PAUL REUBENS So, was it an early alter ego do you think?  

NADIA LEE COHEN: I guess so. It was quite extreme. It probably lasted the duration of school. As soon as I went to college I dropped it.  

PAUL REUBENS Speaking of college, where did you get the skills that you have now? Did you go to art school? 

NADIA LEE COHEN  I went to London College of Fashion for no reason other than fashion and art interested me. I took a course, which was basically a bit of everything: design, textiles, photography, styling, and whatever else is fashion related. And then, they whittled it down. The teacher would say, “You're shit at that, you’re good at that,” until you’re left with two things. Which for me was styling and photography. And they said “pick one,” so I picked photography. Did you go to school for art? 

PAUL REUBENS I dropped out of school in fourth grade. No, I'm kidding (both laugh). I came out here to attend the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) that was founded and endowed by Walt Disney. He conceptualized it, but died before it was actually built. There was a film school, a theater school, an art school, a writing school, a dance school, a music school—all the visual and performing arts under one roof. It was very avant garde when it started. I had gone to a school that was the opposite of that to start and thought, oh no, I want real crazy, avant garde. And that’s exactly what it was. 

NADIA LEE COHEN  How long were you there? 

PAUL REUBENS  I was there for, I think six, years. I never wound up getting a degree, but the one thing that I did that was the smartest thing, or maybe dumb luck a little bit—because I always felt I was so interested in so many things—I just went: do not question what interests you. Just follow whatever interests you. At some point down the line, it's gonna all get mixed together and the meaning will be revealed in some dramatic way. I was so lucky, because when Pee-wee came along, I was present enough to go, this is it, this is the thing—this is what all of that stuff meant. 

NADIA LEE COHEN  Do you think you'd been building Pee-wee for years, unconsciously? 

PAUL REUBENS  Yes, because he’s a whole bunch of different things that all came together. Once I had become Pee-wee Herman, there was an American show called  The Dating Game, which would have three bachelors, and a woman would pick one date. So, I put on my Pee-wee suit and auditioned to be a contestant. This was the first time I had ever gone out into the world as Pee-wee Herman. Prior to that, I'd just been in this little theater group. The second I walked into this audition, I could tell that the people running it were like, oh my god. They were all just trying to not lose their shit. And same with all the guys that were in there. When I filled out an application that asked about hobbies, I answered, cleaning my room—just weird stuff. When I left the audition, I thought to myself, I'm gonna be on this show. I just had this definite confidence that they were going to put me on the show. When I left the audition and walked outside down the street, people were practically walking into the sides of buildings and hitting lampposts. I just went, Do not ignore this. This is real. This is something. This is power. 

NADIA LEE COHEN Did you have the voice developed already?  

PAUL REUBENS  Yes. The voice was from a play I did long before that. I just mixed a bunch of stuff. You know, similar to what you said earlier, I've had to answer: how did I create Pee-wee? And where did the voice come from? You would think after this many years I would have a better story or I would at least make up a lie that would be interesting. But I don't. When you do these things, you’re just creating something that becomes something later on.    

NADIA LEE COHEN Yeah, it just takes form—kind of like a snowball, which rolls until eventually it stops and looks exactly like Pee-wee. Does Pee-wee like anything that you don't like? 

PAUL REUBENS  Oh, I think probably a lot of things. Yeah. I think that if you're hiding behind the character, then there's at least something. I've been doing it for so long that there was a point when I decided I was going to have to change the rules for Pee-wee and allow him to do things and be things he wasn't originally, just because it started to get a little stale for me, and there were other things I wanted to do. Early on, I was in a comedy group and I had lots of other characters. I had about ten alter egos before Pee-wee.  

NADIA LEE COHEN Did they all have looks? 

PAUL REUBENS They were all very detailed, but really different from Pee-wee, and nothing like the kind of impact that Pee-wee had. I feel like what was going on in art school in the ‘70s was performance art and conceptual art. So for me, Pee-wee Herman was always like conceptual art and performance art. And the conceptual part of it, the performance art part of it was my secret—that I wasn't really that person. Because I tried really hard to make it seem like he was a real person. 

NADIA LEE COHEN If you were invited to something, would they expect you to come as Pee-wee? 

PAUL REUBENS Well, the point was that no one even knew who Paul was. No one. For example, when Pee-wee's Big Adventure premiered and my credit came up as a screenwriter, nobody knew who that was. No one knew Paul Reubens had anything to do with Pee-wee Herman because I spent a lot of energy never doing anything out of character. I just thought that if people thought I was an actor, they'd be like, oh yeah, whatever. There was a guy that inspired me in a conceptual way named Tiny Tim. He was a freak, but you never went, oh, that's an act. People were like,  oh my god, he's a freaky person. There was also an act on the Ed Sullivan show who had an alter ego. This is when I was four or five years old. His name was Bill Dana and he would come out with this character named Jose Jimenez who was a Bolivian astronaut. It was very, very similar to Andy Kaufman’s foreign man character. And the third or fourth time watching I realized, wait a minute, this is all made up. He's not really this guy. And I never thought about that again on a conscious level until I met him years later at an autograph show. 

NADIA LEE COHEN I’m trying to think of the British equivalent. Which would probably be Alan Partridge or Alistair McGowan’s Big Impression. I remember being mesmerized at the concept of a person morphing their physicalities, mannerisms, and voice in order to become someone else. 

PAUL REUBENS Did it influence what you do now? 

NADIA LEE COHEN It must have, along with Catherine Tate, or Little Britain. England had a lot of impressionist shows.  

PAUL REUBENS One thing that is happening today culturally, is that it's harder and harder to set yourself apart.  

NADIA LEE COHEN Because we’re over saturated. 

PAUL REUBENS  Just to be cliche for a moment—Andy Warhol said, “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” And we live in a culture, at least in the United States, where lots of people seek fame, and social media is full of people who are trying to become known, and leave their mark. I think it's human nature to wanna leave your mark in some way. 

NADIA LEE COHEN  Did you see the Andy Warhol documentary where they used AI to remake his voice? Would you want that ever, because your fifteen minutes would be forever?  

PAUL REUBENS I'm hoping that I can, at some point, sell or lease my IP. And part of the lure of that is that it would include my digital scans so that you could make a Pee-wee movie long after I'm gone. And when I say that, people always ask about the voice, but by the time they can cheaply churn out an image of me that looks real, they’ll be able to figure out the voice as well. 

NADIA LEE COHEN But we all have so much more ability to create characters now. On the internet you can just pretend that you're living whatever life that you want to live and sell that to whoever's buying it. 

PAUL REUBENS So, how does art even fit into a time when things are so rotten, and horrible, and crazy, and weird, and mixed up? Who has the nerve to be an artist? You have to have some nerve to be an artist. And how do you, even in the art world, set yourself apart? You have set yourself apart completely. 

NADIA LEE COHEN I think it's the confrontation—you absorb what's going on, confront it, turn it into something comical and entertaining, and then show it to people. 

PAUL REUBENS  You know, I hadn't really considered how much in the comedy realm you are. Because in my opinion, most art doesn't include comedy. When you mix a little comedy into art, it makes a whole different thing.  

NADIA LEE COHEN Yes. Take Jordan Wolfson's work. I think he falls into the category of creating comical, dark, and probably quite offensive art to certain people. That’s right up my alley.  

PAUL REUBENS  But your work also transcends so many things. It encompasses so many things. Some of those alter egos are dark and some of them, you can ask, what's their socioeconomic background? Some of those people seem like they could be down on their luck. It’s all over the map. 

NADIA LEE COHEN  They’re a ‘Mr Potato Head’ hybrid of personal relationships or people I’ve seen down the shops. There’s one that's really representative of my uncle Terry, and he’s called Terry. There’s a continuous undercurrent of comedy with my family, my parents are always taking the piss out of each other and cracking jokes. My brother's a comic as well. 

PAUL REUBENS And your parents are funny?  

NADIA LEE COHEN  Yeah. My dad to laugh at and my mom to laugh with.   

PAUL REUBENS How lucky is that? I think it’s so incredibly lucky that my parents were funny— that I grew up with this real intense sense of humor, or irony, or both. 

NADIA LEE COHEN  Yes we are, I find that kind of irony rare in Los Angeles. I also have a lot of gay and camp influence. Are ‘camp’ or ‘kitsch’ annoying buzzwords to you? 

PAUL REUBENS I hate the word kitsch. It’s such an ugly word. I also appreciate that if you say kitsch to certain people, they're like, oh, I get it. I know what you mean.  

NADIA LEE COHEN Maybe we feel like we're above kitsch. 

PAUL REUBENS Not maybe—definitely. There's a sort of snobbery that I have to admit I do have in certain areas. In other areas, I feel just the opposite of that—like everyman kind of qualities, but I definitely feel snobbish about kitsch. 

NADIA LEE COHEN What's the literal definition of kitsch? I’m curious. Should we look it up? ‘Hey Siri what does Kitsch mean?’ 

SIRI Noun. Kitsch means art objects designed or considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way. 

NADIA LEE COHEN It basically describes exactly what we do. 

PAUL REUBENS So, therein lies why we don’t like it, because it’s so insulting.  (laughs) 

NADIA LEE COHEN It's so accurate, though. (laughs) 

PAUL REUBENS Maybe this is more a comment than a question. But it’s shocking how young you are. I guess I was around your age when I already had Pee-wee—I was thirty-two when I made Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and I had already been Pee-Wee for five years, but it’s admirable, and interesting, and amazing that you got it going on like this. I not only really appreciated the hell out of what you were doing at your exhibition, but it just raises all these possibilities of where you're going to go. To be young, and have your whole career ahead of you, and to be where you are right now, it's just staggering. 

NADIA LEE COHEN I wish little me doing the Tequila dance could hear what you just said now—thank you that really means a lot.  But back to you … can you tell me a little bit about playing Michael Jackson’s stunt double? Because I don’t know anything about this. 

PAUL REUBENS The answer to that is you'll have to wait until either my documentary comes out, or my memoir. 

NADIA LEE COHEN  Oh, that's such a great end-of-interview plug. You’ve done this before. (both laugh). I want to pretend that I was somebody’s stunt double too, but I'm not sure who it could be. 

Paul Reubens (né Rubenfeld was born on August 27, 1952 in Peekskill, New York. He privately fought cancer for several years before passing on July 30, 2023 in Los Angeles, CA. He is cherished and missed by fans of all ages from around the world and his work will continue to inspire for many generations.