Paul Reubens
Paul Reubens
Paul Reubens is an American actor, writer, film producer, game show host, and comedian, best known for his character Pee-wee Herman. Reubens joined the Los Angeles troupe The Groundlings in the 1970s and started his career as an improvisational comedian and stage actor. In 1982, Reubens put up a show about a character he had been developing for years. The show was called The Pee-wee Herman Show and it ran for five sold-out months with HBO producing a successful special...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Actor
Date of Birth27 August 1952
CityPeekskill, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I spent an awful long time 12 years ago thinking to myself, you know, this can't be my final thing. I'm a big believer in the happy ending. I want a Pee-Wee movie to have a happy ending. Pee-Wee gets his bicycle back. I don't know what the ending is to my story. But I think it's going to be a happy one.
Look at me, I'm getting defensive about something that happened so many years ago, somebody said. I'll have to find out who that was and if he's still alive.
I was Pee-wee Herman for so many years that it wasn't really a question that I didn't want to do other things.
I don't really want to direct myself, but I'm certainly torn in that direction.
I can be on the Tonight Show, but not with Johnny [Carson]. He uses my name in his monologue all the time.
I feel the only way I'm going to be successful in moving on is if I keep a separation.
A large part of the reason I want to be so mysterious is so that I can move on and do something serious at some point in my career X years from now. It might be very difficult otherwise, because I'm... wild
I'm the person with the final say on everything. I really love being in that position.
I remember one play [when I was kid] was about this murderous mad scientist, and my whole part was to be the guy who got thrown into a vat of acid as the curtain went up. I was very pissed off at these older kids; they'd outsmarted me.
I just feel in a lot of ways black people are so much looser and cooler. Just as a culture, it's so much more real.
Why would I, in a million years, want to do anything even remotely having to do with child molestation on a children's show? See, I take having a kids' show real seriously. I think it's an enormous responsibility.
It's a lot easier to say you're a comic than a performance artist.
I was looking to be pale, you know, like the kind of person who has that pigment in their skin where no matter what the weather is they have pink cheeks. I had a couple of friends like that. But it was all very instinctive in a way. I never really thought that much about it.
I wasn't a great improviser when I started there; I'm not really up on current events. I would always just mug, just try to get my laughs from making faces. So I decided to do a character who should never have become a comic - somebody you would see at the Comedy Store and go, "This person is never going to make it."