Paul Reubens did not tell his director that he was dying. On July 31, 2023, the news of Reubens’ death came as a shock to documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf, who had spent a year trying to convince him to make the ambitious two-part documentary “Pee-wee as Himself,

My career would’ve absolutely suffered if I was openly gay,” he reveals in the moving posthumous HBO documentary ‘Pee-wee as Himself.’ “So I went to great lengths for many, many years to keep it a secret.