Ric Heitzman: A Pee-wee's Playhouse Production Designer on Art, Animation, and Finding the Humor in Anything


text by Karly Quadros
portrait by Joshua White

“Guess who’s at the door, Pee-wee!”

Anyone who was a kid in the late-80s (or a lover of camp, kitsch, and tactile production design in any subsequent decade) knows the phrase well. Emanating from a jolly windowpane, it signaled the entrance of any number of zany characters: a rhinestone cowboy with an animated lasso, a bobbleheaded salesman, a 1950s beehive towering to the ceiling. Every Saturday morning at 10 a.m., the cast and characters of Pee-wee’s Playhouse pogo-sticked around a mid-century, candy-colored dream home, stuffed to the brim with puppets, papier mache, and wallpaper only the 80s could produce. Pee-wee Herman – the impish avatar of host and comedian Paul Reubens who is the center of a new two-part documentary, Pee-Wee As Himself, airing on May 23 – was the clear heart of the show, but it was the world of Pee-wee’s Playhouse that had kids wishing they could live inside their own surrealist bungalow.

Artist Ric Heitzman worked on Pee-wee’s Playhouse as a production designer, puppeteer, and voice actor for characters like Mr. Window, Cool Cat, and the Salesman. Even after the show ended in 1991, Heitzman’s art is packed with a boundless gestural joy and cast of characters straight from Sunday morning cartoons. Working across comics, cartoons, and commercial animation, Heitzman’s Escher-like paintings have a technicolor psychedelia to them, packed densely with explosions of color, hatching, and characters romping their way through their worlds.

Heitzman’s new show, Squiggly Dee, is on display until June 9 at Face Guts, a storefront gallery project from artist and former animator Tim Biskup, in collaboration with White Box LA. The two artists got together to discuss Pee-wee’s Playhouse, recurring dreams, and finding the humor in anything.

TIM BISKUP: What’s your favorite animal to draw?

RIC HEITZMAN: I draw a lot of insectoid characters. The first thing that came to my mind is Triceratops because that’s the animal I like the most, but I don’t draw it very often. I think about it a lot. Everything I draw is a mashup. I noticed I draw a lot of things that look like donkey-giraffe compilations. There’s a lot of insectoid things like centipedes and millipedes, things that look like human heads and insect bodies. That’s been in my head for a long time. It’s probably from playing with bugs as a kid. Kept everything in boxes with wax paper over them.

BISKUP: Of all the Pee-wee’s Playhouse characters, which one was the most like you?

HEITZMAN: Mr. Window. Mr. Window is the most open. Mr. Window [dips into the character’s cadence] is also just my voice. ‘Hey, Peewee, guess who’s at the door!’ That’s basically all I said. ‘It’s the King of Cartoons!’ I liked the character of the window. I liked it because it was really happy. All those characters were happy, but that particular character was big and happy. Plus, I designed it.

BISKUP: Was there one that you didn’t like?

HEITZMAN: No. There was nothing on that show I didn’t like. Even the characters that other people didn’t like, I liked. To me, it was like a sandwich. If you take away something, you don’t know what else would be there anyway. We were recently together as a group, and George McGrath, the writer, said he never liked the salesman character because the exaggerated size of his head always bugged him. But it functioned in the narrative as this irritating thing. It bothered him – it was supposed to bother everybody. That’s the point. 

BISKUP: You’ve told me so many great stories about famous people that you’ve just randomly run into: your James Brown story, the Belushi and Akroyd story is incredible, the Dolly Parton story.

HEITZMAN: I was just in the right place at the right time. A lot of people came to [Pee-wee’s Playhouse]. I met a lot of people, not necessarily through Paul [Reubens], but through my associations with Paul when that show was on.

BISKUP: Can you tell me a random one that you haven’t told me yet? Have you met Liza Minelli?

HEITZMAN: No, I haven’t met Liza Minelli. I did go to a drag show when I first moved to LA and there was a really great Liza Minelli imitator.

BISKUP: Cher?

HEITZMAN: Oh yes, I’ve met Cher. She came to the Playhouse. She was on the Christmas show. That was amazing to meet her because she was really sweet.I don’t know how old she was, but she looked amazing. When people came on that show, either they were fascinated by it, because it was like being in Candyland, everybody walking around with their mouths open, or they were terrified.

She was one that was absolutely terrified. Paul introduced her to us before we did the shot. She admitted to us she was nervous because she always did stuff for adults and she didn’t know how to do this. Paul was like, “Don’t worry about it. Just play it the way you play it. Don’t worry about who it’s for.” It was just funny to see someone who does these giant stage shows and performs all over the world, and they come on set and they’re insecure about it. You wouldn’t think somebody that big would be that vulnerable.

BISKUP: The way that you’re talking about it gives me a great picture of what it was like to work there and the amount of vulnerability it created in people whether they were feeling joy or fear.

HEITZMAN: Most people felt joy. That’s the thing that I can say that I’m proudest of about that show. You were able to convey a pure sense of joy. You do that too. Your stuff has joy in it. To me, that’s the best thing in the world. It’s harder to be funny than it is to be serious.

BISKUP: It’s vulnerable.

HEITZMAN: Comedy has tragedy in it, but it still has to be funny. 

That show afforded us, at least afforded me, a view into this world that I never expected to have. I didn’t come out here to do that. I always just wanted to be an artist. In fact, when we first got an Emmy, I was like, “What is that?” I always heard that term, but I was like, “What is an Emmy really?” I remember when they said, “You won an Emmy,” I was like, “This is great, but could I get a show somewhere? Show my art?” 

That’s what I wanted. In other words, if you’re not going for this stuff, you look at it slightly differently. It was a window into a world that I never thought I’d ever have a window into. I was always like, [ silly voice] “Golly!”

BISKUP: [similar silly voice] “Look at all this cool stuff!”

HEITZMAN: Some of it was cool, but also the personalities! Like you said, I have stories. I literally have seen every kind of behavior on set that could ever happen: tantrums, people punching walls, people throwing themselves down in the middle of a scene crying. It’s a place where people feel comfortable just going to pieces. I’m not talking about people in front of the camera. I’m talking about the director, the costumer, the lighting person, somebody falling out of the rafters, the wardrobe catching on fire. You just go, this is Hollywood, man. This is wild. This is uncharted territory. Something can happen at any minute. I know workplaces can be like that. It’s emotional craziness but also technical craziness, and sometimes it’s both at the same time. People’s emotions are really raw in live action shooting. That’s the great thing about animation. You’re gonna see it through very slowly. 

BISKUP: It’s gonna develop over a long period of time, and you’re gonna be alone.

HEITZMAN: You’re never gonna be patient enough.

BISKUP: When you’re talking to somebody, do you see the cartoon version of them?

HEITZMAN: I see a humorous version of what’s going on very often. It’s exaggerated. I almost see a punchline before it’s coming. Someone can be telling a poignant story, and I don’t mean to make fun of them, but you get ahead of them and you think, is this gonna be a joke? But there’s no joke. But in your mind you imagine the joke.

BISKUP: Do you think about how you would draw them?

HEITZMAN: Now that I’m a seasoned artist, I could translate that at any time. I’m not as ambitious as I used to be because otherwise I get frustrated because some of this stuff passes in a moment. It’s really only at that moment, and it makes me happy. 

The characters get exaggerated, almost like Hee-Haw or some other TV show like Monty Python. It’s the kind of stuff I’ve always been drawn to. Everything just gets exaggerated in my head. I find it very humorous and it puts me in a good mood and happy. It’s a state of mind that I’m in most of the time.

BISKUP: I actively look for funny things that people say. I have a tendency to share my interpretation of what somebody said that was obviously not what they meant to say. I have a way of picking language apart and thinking of different ways to think about something that somebody said that makes it funnier. Does that ever make you feel crazy?

HEITZMAN: I think it's an inner world. I thought about that for a long time because even from an early age it makes you more isolated, developing another world or being able to look at your subconscious. I would say a lot of people are not in touch with their subconscious. Maybe I’m not using the right term.  

I have lots of examples of being somewhere – especially when I was dating women, and even with Lorainne, my wife – and I’ll be sitting somewhere with a really big smile on my face, and she says, “Why are you smiling like that?” And I’m honest. I’ll say, “If you could see what I’m seeing in my head right now, you’d be very happy too.” 

I have a really rich inner world. I could close my eyes right now and just start imaging stuff, and it’s always really entertaining to me, even when it’s dark, just because it’s cool looking [laughs]. You get caught up in your own imagination. That’s what an artist does.

BISKUP: I felt like I was crazy when I was younger, but now…

HEITZMAN: When did you start feeling like that, I wonder?

BISKUP: I was not doing well in school, and my mom was trying to figure out why and she took me to some doctors to get tested. They told her, “He’s really smart!” The translation I made in my head is, Okay, I’m really smart, but I’m not doing well in school, so I must be crazy. I just sat with that idea in my head for most of my life. I explained everything based on that.

HEITZMAN: But you weren’t scared of yourself, were you?

BISKUP: I think this is why I avoided drugs. The one time I smoked weed, it was really existentially terrifying. All the big fears that I didn’t even realize I had came out, and it was just like, Oh God, I cannot do this. I cannot let that stuff out of the bag. I always felt like there was this stockpile of craziness inside of me that I just had to keep a lid on.

HEITZMAN: When were you first conscious of this?

BISKUP: I had terrible nightmares when I was a kid, so I was scared to go to sleep.

HEITZMAN: Were they recurring nightmares?

BISKUP: I don’t think they were recurring until my thirties. Then I started having them, and they helped me get out of a career that I was troubled by and start actually making paintings. 

HEITZMAN: Have they gone away?

BISKUP: Yeah. When I was working in animation, I kept having these dreams that there was a portal inside my house, and on the other side of this portal, there was a whole universe of these characters and it was my responsibility to help these characters escape.

HEITZMAN: That’s a good responsibility. Unless they were characters of ill repute.

BISKUP: No, they were defenseless little guys. And my house was a machine that would help them get into my dimension. Eventually I stopped working in animation and started making paintings and selling them in galleries. And all of those dreams went away.  I had a friend who was having dinner at our house one night and she said, “Those were your paintings. Those were the characters from your paintings.” You got something like that?

HEITZMAN: Oh yeah. Going through the entertainment industry, it’s just a different approach to creativity because it’s creativity on demand, and that’s very different from creativity when you’re just sitting around daydreaming. When I was in the industry, most of what I was doing in my dreams was trying to figure out the jobs that were ahead of me. If I had a storyboard or something, all I could do in my dream was turn it over and over again.

But I had a recurring nightmare when I was really young that went away about the time I was a graduate student in college. A Tyrannosaurus was always coming at me, and I was always running into a room where my mother was. Her back was to me so I never saw her face, then I looked out the window, and it wasn’t the Tyrannosaurus but a tornado coming, and that’s when I woke up.

BISKUP: So the dinosaur wasn’t as scary as the tornado.

HEITZMAN: Yeah, because a tornado was something that would happen in my real life.

BISKUP: It makes me think of the storm drawing from your last show here. You told me some kind of emotional stuff that was wrapped up in that.

HEITZMAN: Most of my drawings address the humor that I feel most of the time. At least, I hope most of those drawings exude a certain humor that’s chaotic and spastic. But sometimes when I’m frustrated, usually about something in my life, some situation that I can’t really do anything about – I can’t spend the money, I can’t fix this, I don’t know the answer, damned if you do, damned if you don’t – I’m just trying to struggle through something. I don’t know what the answer’s going to be so I just try to put it into the drawing, and those drawings tend to be pretty dark, just because of the nature of indecision and lack of control.

There’s a bunch of these drawings that I wouldn’t show anybody. They’re just messed up.  Some of ‘em I painted over. It’s a side of you that you’re not proud of, so you’re not sure how people would interpret seeing them.

BISKUP: Do you think they show clearly that emotional intensity that you’re not comfortable with? Would I see that if I looked at it?

HEITZMAN: I don’t know. I just know how it resonates with me when I look at it. It’s okay. I captured that and put it in the bottle. But I don’t want it out of the bottle.

BISKUP: I have those too.

There’s pieces that I have that I’ve shown that may be dealing with really intense things that I don’t want to talk to people about necessarily, but nobody’s going to get that from looking at it because there’s an abstraction that kind of takes it away. But the energy that it transmits is still really powerful.

HEITZMAN: I tend to just put those things away and go on to something else. The one that you saw, it’s not that I like that one particular drawing and I didn’t like the other drawings. It’s just there’s something revealing, something when I see it that irritates me. It doesn’t make me go, “I want to show that to people.” There’s a lot of stuff in portfolios: it’s the evil portfolio.

BISKUP: Would you show me?

HEITZMAN: Maybe. I’ve shown very few people that just because it really is stuff I should get rid of. There’s also stuff that’s just not politically correct from a long time ago that I’m ashamed of. I’ve destroyed a lot of that. I don’t know why I haven’t destroyed the rest because it really needs to be.

BISKUP: It’s interesting because listening to that new Robert Crumb biography, he talks about flushing his work down the toilet for years. When he finally unleashed those things on the world, that’s when he really achieved fame and fortune.

HEITZMAN: I think that I’d be flogged. I think about that portfolio that I’m talking about, and the reason I haven’t thrown away some of that stuff is because I rendered it very well. It’s an evil thought, but I rendered it really well.

It’s funny because, especially when I had commercial artwork to do, the illustrated kind of design, I clenched a lot. I was really good at the beginning about starting with really loose drawings, but then when I had to formalize it I got really tight. I didn’t like where it went.

It affected my sleep. It affected a bunch of stuff about me. But people don’t know the difference. They say, “It looks great!” and you’re like, “God, it really kills me.” With commercial work, I felt it in my shoulders. My wife, she’s the most honest person. She’d just look over my shoulder and go, “Why did you tighten up?” She knows. After a little stretch, when I got out of [commercial work] and started doing animation, she’d say, “I’m so glad you don’t do that anymore because you don’t tighten up like you used to.” In animation, you don’t have time to tighten up. I was doing storyboards as fast as I could possibly draw them. I didn’t have time to think, This has got to be perfect.

BISKUP: I know some really good storyboard people who draw terribly, but their ideas are so good.

HEITZMAN: You know, I was freaking out when I first got into it. I never thought I was very good at it. When you turn it into a client for the very first time and you’re like, “Are they gonna understand this? Is this gonna make any sense?”

BISKUP: I talked to John Kricfalusi once about storyboarding. I was a background painter at the time. And you know what he said to me? He asked, “How old are you?” And I said, “I’m thirty.” He goes, “Don’t you think it’s a little late to be learning how to draw?”

HEITZMAN: [laughs] Wow. That’s supportive.

BISKUP: He loves to do that. He’s a challenger, man. Let me just say, I never did storyboards. That was me trying to get into storyboards, and that’s what he said. Thanks, John.

HEITZMAN: When I started doing storyboards, which was in Chicago, I realized fairly early on, you might be able to imagine the scenes, but you’re around a lot of people who can’t. In other words, they’re relying on you. 

Now, translating those drawings and being able to make it look like what they want it to look like? They don’t know what they want it to look like, but they know they don’t want it to look like R. Crumb or some funny animal comic. I had a really hard time drawing serious storyboards for serious things. They always looked rubbery. I couldn’t un-exaggerate. 

BISKUP: That is the inherent problem with animation: you’re working with people above you who are essentially going to tell you to make it less good.

HEITZMAN: You start out with a great idea, and you end up with one that’s just been cut to pieces. That’s the way most animation in America is. They say things like, “We have an artist-centric studio,” because they think that’s what they want to have. People love to rag on producers, and I can honestly say that there are producers to be ragged on, lots of ‘em. But I’ve also found producers who were really smart and who really believed in art and were just as good about managing people. But it’s few and far between. There are a lot of stupid people who ask you to do stupid things for stupid reasons.

It’s a hard business. But it’s mostly psychological. It’s not the art as much. It’s the psychology of trying to get all those people at the table to agree on something without too many opinions. Because they all want to have an opinion. 

HEITZMAN: Disney was the worst. I started out as a storyboard artist, and I worked myself all the way up to director. Then I was creative director, which is above the line. I didn’t know what that meant ‘til I was above the line. You’re just this über-head that looks over everything. “Oh, we can’t do it that way. This can’t be done that way.” If somebody’s really weak, you have to step in and say, “This person’s not doing their job.” I have to help them do whatever it is they’re doing or get rid of them.

BISKUP: How many years was that before you got there, above the line?

HEITZMAN: Oh that was a long time. That was way after Pee-wee. At least twenty years before I got to that. And I was just somebody that didn’t know that was a job.

In cartoons, it was not that developed. It was really small at Funny Garbage when I was doing cartoons for Cartoon Network. They wanted me to develop an entire division to make cartoons.

BISKUP: I was at Nickelodeon working at Oh Yeah! Cartoons at the same time. What a trip.

HEITZMAN: That was in ‘99.

BISKUP: I left the industry in 2001.

HEITZMAN: What forced me out of that industry was 9/11. Funny Garbage was very close to the Twin Towers. That was the Monday after I delivered the contract. I did twenty-five one-shot cartoons, three TV series, and a music video. I delivered that contract on Friday, so I was not in a hurry to get to work. I looked out the window of my building and the plane went right into the tower. It was the wildest thing to see. I knew something was wrong.

BISKUP: Whenever I think of leaving  animation, I always think of pulling back a bow string. Like my whole time working in animation was like tightening, tightening, and then all of a sudden I shot into a gallery. Is that what this feels like for you?

HEITZMAN: No, I went too long in that business. I burned myself completely out, and I couldn’t work for a while. I couldn’t really do anything. I took on too much. I couldn’t think funny.

Basically I couldn’t go anywhere unless I pitched something and it sold. I’d directed, I’d produced, I’d co-written things. People expected me to be delivering. Everybody said, “Okay, just bring us a product, and we’ll either do it or not.” I did that for a while, and I just got burned out.

BISKUP: How did you get back?

HEITZMAN: I taught for a while. I thought when I first started teaching that I would have a regular paycheck because I didn’t have one doing those jobs. They were always just up and down. I thought, This will give me some time to think out where I’m at. And it did. 

My whole trajectory with my work outside my art is that I’ll do as best I can until I get really tired of it, and then I’ll just walk away from it completely. This last walk away – which I hope is the last walk away, I hope to just be an artist the rest of my life, that’s what I want to do – I finally got to the point where I walked away from teaching. Even if I do it part-time, my head is going to be so distracted. I can’t make the art I want to make.

When I did that, I looked back and I was like, “God, I’ve had forty-five different careers where I’ve walked away from that career saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I have to do my art.’” You were smarter than me.

BISKUP: [laughs]

HEITZMAN: Right after Pee-wee, a lot of people that were close to me decided not to do this anymore. A lot of big artists I knew who were working partially in the industry like you were, they just decided to jettison the whole thing and be artists and make a go of it. I was a little insecure. I felt like I couldn’t.

I know you did what you did, and I have to say to this day, I really admire you for doing it. I admire all my friends who did it because I was insecure and I didn’t do it. And I feel like now I’m doing it.

BISKUP: When I did it, it was far more profitable than animation.

HEITZMAN: That’s the secret I didn’t know.

BISKUP: But only for about four years. And then there’s been fifteen years of barely making it. But having those four years in my head, I know I just gotta survive until there’s another wave. I’ve survived on that idea.

HEITZMAN: You’re good at looking ahead and strategizing. I’ve learned something from you in that world.

BISKUP: I think I really had to break away from the strategic part for a while. That’s what [storefront gallery space] Face Guts was about for me, just seeing how strategic I had been and that it was not working. I had reached a point where I was pushing so hard, and I think I was pretty annoying to most people. I realized that I had to get more loose and play around more and enjoy myself more. Being able to step away from strategy for a while made something energetic that I think was powerful and more true to who I am, so now I can be more strategic again.

HEITZMAN: You have the confidence because you know who you are. I’m a little behind you, but at the same time, I understand. I’m gaining on the confidence side.

BISKUP: I see this work and your last show as such a clear vision of who you are.

I haven’t asked you any of the questions I wrote down!

HEITZMAN: [laughs]

Pee-wee & Nadia's Playhouse

 

Autre Magazine, Vol. 2 Iss. 15 F/W 2022: Losing My Religion

 

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 wears CELINE
Paul wears TOM FORD

 

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 thingthis 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 wears glasses by l.a.Eyeworks.

 

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.