There have been as many failed attempts to get Superman onto the silver screen as there are Superman movies that actually made it—but Superman: Flyby is perhaps one of the most infamous, just for the sheer capacity of what-could-have-beens with the amount of people up for the titular heroic role. Matt Bomer was the man who flew closest to Krypton—but believes that he ultimately lost out for being in the closet.
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“I went in on a cattle call for Superman, and then it turned into a one-month audition experience where I was auditioning again and again and again. It looked like I was the director’s choice for the role. This was a very early iteration of Superman written by J.J. Abrams, called Superman: Flyby, and it never came to light,” Bomer recently reflected on an episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast. At the time, the project known as Flyby was being helmed by Brett Ratner, who’d been hired by Warner to make the movie in 2002. Ratner saw Bomer as his perfect choice for Clark Kent, with the actor noting that he ultimately had signed a three-picture deal. Things fell apart, and Ratner went on to leave the project himself shortly thereafter—but Bomer believes that his sexuality played a part in why the studio was suddenly disinterested in him being the new Man of Steel.
“That was a time in the industry when something like that could still really be weaponized against you,” Bomer, who publicly came out as gay in 2012, continued. “How, and why, and who, I don’t know, but yeah, that’s my understanding.” Ratner departed Flyby in 2003 and was replaced by McG, who rebuilt Flyby from the ground up, including casting, only to eventually leave as well—setting the stage for Bryan Singer’s eventual reboot of the project as Superman Returns, now starring Brandon Routh, in 2006.
This isn’t the first time it’s been suggested that Bomer missed out on Superman because of his sexuality—after Bomer publicly came out in 2012, author Jackie Collins stated in an interview with Gaydar Radio that being closeted cost Bomer the role years prior. But studio sources pushed back on the allegation at the time, citing that Bomer’s deal for Flyby and potential sequels fell through due to Ratner exiting the project.
Whatever the reason, Bomer himself still at least believes that being outed to studio executives at least played a role even today—but even if he didn’t make it into Flyby, he got to proverbially don the blue-and-red supersuit, playing Superman in the 2013 DCAU animated movie, Superman: Unbound. At the very least, Bomer would go on to play a part in in the DC Universe that actually got to reflect his experience as a gay man, playing the closeted test pilot Larry Trainor, a.k.a. Negative Man, in the excellent Doom Patrol TV series.
Spoiler warning for Fellow Travelers’ fifth episode, “Promise You Won’t Write.”
The epic love story of Fellow Travelers reaches a wrenching turning point in its fifth episode, now streaming on Paramount+ With Showtime. Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller (Matt Bomer) and Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey), closeted political staffers working in McCarthy-Era Washington, find their passionate, at times fraught romantic affair suddenly untenable as the cultural circumstances surrounding them intensify. Hawk is compelled to commit to a romance he doesn’t believe in with Lucy Smith (Allison Williams), daughter of the senator to whom Hawk has dedicated his career, after tragedy strikes and the family breaks apart. Tim’s allegiance to Senator Joseph McCarthy (Chris Bauer) finally, firmly cracks as he sees the demagogue’s methods for what they are, just as the Lavender Scare reaches its apex.
The episode’s title, “Promise You Won’t Write,” comes from one of the episode’s last lines, and is drawn straight from the novel by Thomas Mallon, the loose basis for the show. It captures the longing our lovelorn heroes are left with. Tim joins the military. Hawk gets engaged to a woman. Their story ends here, for now—a choice creator Ron Nyswaner made by situating their separation in a juicy political context, against the backdrop of the downfall of McCarthy at his Senate censure hearing and a similar moment of reckoning for Roy Cohn (Will Brill), both stories of which were pulled from the public historical record. Nyswaner puts down his artistic stamp by unifying all of these tales—plus that of fictional Black journalist Marcus Hooks (Jelani Alladin) as he embarks on his own new path—under the harrowingly wide cloud of homophobia. In Fellow Travelers, as in the U.S. circa 1954, no one could escape it; its impact could be life-or-death.
In an exclusive breakdown of the end of Fellow Travelers’ time in the ‘50s, Nyswaner discusses his various storylines coming to a head at his series’s midpoint—as he gets ready to hurtle the action decades into the future.
**Vanity Fair: **This is a real narrative turning point and marks the end of the McCarthy era for the show. Why now?
Ron Nyswaner: The Army-McCarthy hearings are a very important part of the story, because it is where Joe McCarthy’s career comes to a crashing end. It just naturally seemed to fall here. I could develop the McCarthy/Cohn/Schine story through the first four episodes to this climactic point. Then it seemed, if that’s going to be that climax, it felt natural that this is where Tim sees who his hero really is—well, but not just one hero, but who both of his heroes really are. Hawk reveals himself to Tim in a way that is disturbing to him; McCarthy reveals himself to Tim in a way that is really disturbing to him. That leaves Tim, as he says—he’s lost. Then he joins the Army.
In all of the episode’s stories, this mere threat of outing informs seismic character changes, from Hawk to McCarthy to Cohn. It’s obviously a statement for the show as a whole and this era you’re working in. Can you just talk a little bit about understanding the sheer significance of that kind of threat coming to a head for characters here?
The Army-McCarthy hearings took place over weeks and weeks and weeks. The amount of transcripts are huge, but going into the research I really saw the very thing that you mentioned. You can look at the end of Joseph McCarthy’s career in those hearings as caused by homophobia. I actually think we make a good case for it.
A lot of people think of it as a moment we didn’t include, when Joseph Welch pounds his fist on the table and says, “Have you no decency, sir?” Like, at long last tapping into decency, and boom, that was it, McCarthy was over. I’m not alone, as there is a McCarthy biographer who agrees with me, but to me the moment was when the words “pixie and fairy” are introduced into the dialogue and are pointed right at McCarthy and Cohn. From the story that we’re telling, that was the natural climax of our show, because this demagogue who was the second most powerful person in the United States is brought down in flames, so to speak, by being painted with the gay brush. It destroyed his career. What I loved, and I twist it from the book, is that it was homosexuals in the show—Hawk and Tim; Tim unwittingly, Hawk wittingly—who bring down McCarthy and Cohn with homophobia. That great irony.
Fellow Travelers marks Bomer’s first executive producer credit, and only his second producing credit to date; his first came for the latter years of White Collar, which ended nearly a decade ago. What binds those two roles, arguably his most notable onscreen thus far, is the embodiment of deception. In White Collar, a snappy procedural, Bomer played a con artist who lends his unparalleled skills in illegal maneuvering to the FBI. You believe he’s a career criminal because Bomer can sell it with a smirk.
When the show ended, Bomer was newly out in the industry and realizing his place in it was changing. If a certain kind of leading-man lane had closed to him, his collaborations with the likes of Steven Soderbergh (Magic Mike) and Ryan Murphy (The Boys in the Band) opened up a more fruitful path. “I can’t look back in anger,” he says. A project like Fellow Travelers weighs on him because of what it took even for him to nab to such a juicy part. “I want more queer actors to have opportunities to play roles like this and to be trusted with roles like this,” he says. “I’d be lying to you if I said that wasn’t in the back of my mind.”
Aside from some voice work, a cameo in the latest Magic Mike movie, and most significantly the acclaimed Murphy-produced adaptation of The Boys in the Band,Maestro is Bomer’s only movie since 2018. His first days in production took place at the music venue of Tanglewood, where the legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein, portrayed in the film by Cooper, performed and taught throughout his life. (Bomer plays the clarinetist David Oppenheim, one of Bernstein’s lovers.) In the Massachusetts woods, he was rehearsing for Cooper, also the director, while producer Steven Spielberg hung around, spontaneously filming Bomer on his own personal camera. “I thought, Oh, my God, it’s like two of my heroes in the same room. How do I do this?’” Bomer recalls. “With Bradley, I felt like I was working with Cassavetes and Orson Welles at the same time.”
Now a significant Oscar contender for Netflix, Maestro represents another breakthrough for Bomer. He filmed it just before Fellow Travelers and found watching Cooper inhabit Bernstein across different eras impact the way he approached the Showtime limited series: “Watching him jump through all the time periods, I thought, Oh, wow. Okay. You can do this.” He had to go back and forth between Fellow Travelers and reshoots of Maestro in the fall. His head was spinning.
Not that you’d ever witness the chaos on camera. In Maestro, too, Bomer is cool, collected, and commanding. He sees both Oppenheim and Travelers’ Hawk as people who “did what they had to do.” He sees himself that way, in fact. “When I was first breaking into the business, I did what I had to do to try to get roles,” he says. “And then at a certain point, I hit the fuck-it button.” Maybe so—that unburdening is evident in his rich recent work. But it’s no secret that Bomer is a master of appearances. He’s played suave liars for most of his career; he’s learned exactly what to give to the camera and when.
In an upcoming episode of Fellow Travelers, Hawk and his new bride, played by Allison Williams, prepare to have sex. Filming of the scene, as always, began with the director calling action. In character, Bomer then reached up and gently pushed Williams’s hair back. The improvised move seemed like a simple, tender, loving gesture—but its function was sneakily practical. The episode’s director, Uta Briesewitz, whispered to Nyswaner, who was beside her at the monitor, “He just cleared her profile.” Bomer knew Williams’s hair was blocking her face. He didn’t ignore it or restart to get through the take; he instead managed to fix the shot’s composition while simultaneously enhancing its mood—and all as if he weren’t doing a thing. “That’s who Matt is,” Nyswaner says. “He’s so aware.”
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Robbie Rogers doesn’t mind if viewers tune in to “Fellow Travelers” simply to catch the show’s much-buzzed-about sex scenes.
The political thriller series, which premiered on Showtime last week, stars Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer as two gay men who have steamy romps in remote cabins and swanky apartments, as well as on a sun-drenched Fire Island beach, over the course of eight episodes. Among the more titillating moments is a toe-sucking scene that makes other on-screen portrayals of same-sex love, like “Brokeback Mountain” and “Call Me by Your Name,” seem chaste by comparison.
But Rogers, an executive producer on “Fellow Travelers,” is hopeful audiences will take time to contemplate the rich, LGBTQ-inclusive history that the show depicts, too.
“For a lot of people, the LGBTQ+ community started with Stonewall, and that’s actually not correct,” the former athlete told HuffPost. “There are other stories and other uprisings and other marches that we should be exploring and talking about and be aware of. It takes some effort beyond what’s being taught in schools.”
Jonathan Bailey, left, and Matt Bomer, right, in Showtime’s “Fellow Travelers.”
Ben Mark Holzberg/Showtime
Based on Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel, “Fellow Travelers” follows a decadeslong romance between a newly minted college graduate, Tim Laughlin (played by Bailey) and a State Department official, Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller (Bomer). Their relationship begins in secret during the anti-LGBTQ “Lavender Scare” of the 1950s, during which thousands of U.S. government employees lost their jobs because of their sexuality or gender identity, and continues through the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the ’80s.
In addition to Bailey and Bomer, the show’s cast includes Allison Williams as Lucy Smith, a senator’s daughter who becomes Hawk’s wife, and Jelani Alladin as Marcus Hooks, a Black political journalist whose love interest is a drag queen, Frankie Hines (Noah J. Ricketts).
Rogers said he first picked up Mallon’s book at the suggestion of series showrunner Ron Nyswaner, with whom he worked on the 2022 film “My Policeman.” There were elements of the novel that reminded him of his own trajectory as a professional soccer player who, in 2013, became the first openly gay athlete in a major U.S. sport. Mostly, he found himself rapt by the forbidden love story at its center.
From left, “Fellow Travelers” stars Matt Bomer, Jonathan Bailey, Allison Williams, Jelani Alladin and Noah J. Ricketts.
“I’m very lucky to be a gay man in this time, and I’d never want to compare my time as a soccer player to the ’50s,” Rogers said. “But as a gay man in sports, I felt like an outsider my whole life. Professional sports have been incredibly homophobic in the past, and you’re scared you’ll be outed and that your teammates who’ve become your family won’t embrace you anymore.”
He continued: “I’m interested in history when the stakes were high. I knew nothing about the Lavender Scare ― obviously, I knew bits and pieces about the AIDS epidemic ― but I loved the idea of telling a love story when it’s dangerous for two men to love each other.”
Rogers said he and Nyswaner approached Bomer for the role of Hawk almost immediately. As for Bailey, the “Bridgerton” actor had remained on the producers’ minds after trying out for a role in “My Policeman.”
Given the shifting time frames and varied locations, “Fellow Travelers” presented its creative team with a fair share of challenges. But as for those sex scenes, Rogers said he and the rest of the creative team “never set out to be salacious or push the envelope.”
A scene from the new Showtime series, “Fellow Travelers.”
Ben Mark Holzberg/Showtime
“When you’re dealing with internalized homophobia, religion and other things that are very oppressive … if you’re able to express yourself through sex and through love, it can be very, very emotional,” he explained. “These sex scenes are very much about power.”
Though he’s best known for his years as an athlete, Rogers is no novice to television production. He and husband Greg Berlanti ― the Emmy-nominated screenwriter and director whose Hollywood résumé includes “Dawson’s Creek” and the 2018 film “Love, Simon” ― shared producing duties on the 2018 series, “All American.”
But Rogers is especially hopeful that the success of “Fellow Travelers” will pave the way for future projects. At present, his goals include bringing a queer story set in the world of professional sports to the screen.
“I lived in that world for so long, and I’d love to figure out a way to tell that story and tell it in a big way,” he said. “Maybe it’s a biopic, or maybe it’s taking bits and pieces of different people’s stories. Obviously, there aren’t many gay athletes, and I’d love to give people an insight into what that world looks like and why it’s still so difficult for athletes to come out and continue to play.”
Exactly 20 years ago, Daniel Minahan directed his first episode of television for one of the most acclaimed series of its era, Six Feet Under—and on that set, he received an education in the rules of episodic guest-directing. “It had a very rigorous palette, very rigorous lens selection and ideas about blocking and tone,” he says. “You could turn on Six Feet Under at any point and you would recognize it.” It’s a lesson Minahan kept in mind as he stopped by dozens of major series over the next two decades—Deadwood, Grey’s Anatomy, The Good Wife, Game of Thrones, Homeland, and more. And it’s a mantra he’s carried more recently, at last, as the director in charge.
On Showtime’s Fellow Travelers, the director sets a strict template by helming the snappy first two episodes and executive producing the entire series. “I want you to be able to see the continuity throughout, so it feels like one long piece,” he says. In bringing his own sensibility and discipline, Minahan finds that this epic limited series—which examines a gay love story from the early days of DC McCarthyism to the apex of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco—marks a culmination point for his journeyman career. “It’d be hard to go back to being a director for hire on a show,” he says. “I put a lot of myself into this, and I had a lot to offer.”
Long a passion project of Oscar nominee Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia), Fellow Travelers found Minahan also taking on a producer’s duties, working with the creator on matters of casting, location scouting, and, of course, visual storytelling. He’s been doing more of that of late: directing the Deadwood finale movie for HBO, closely collaborating with David Milch; working deeply on the second installment of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story; helming the entirety of their next collaboration, Halston, for which Ewan McGregor won an Emmy. Fellow Travelers marks a logical next step, then, for an accomplished director who knows TV inside and out—it’s an old-fashioned historical miniseries, realized with grand scope, but infused with frank depictions of queer sexuality drawn from Minahan’s own life.
“I came of age as a young gay person in the early ’80s, and moved to New York just at the moment when you’re supposed to be experimenting and falling in love,” he says. “I had firsthand experience of what that was like.”
Minahan on Fellow Travelers.
Ian Watson
Minahan’s first notable credit as a filmmaker actually came as a screenwriter, when he agreed to collaborate with friend Mary Harron on the script for I Shot Andy Warhol, a daring portrait of the feminist artist Valerie Solanas. A critical darling produced by Christine Vachon’s Killer Films and featuring a stellar Lili Taylor in the lead role, the film dropped Minahan into the ’90s American indie boom before production even began. “We had a friend that was remodeling the Chateau Marmont, and [Mary and I] moved in, which was the most unbelievable place—with people like Helmut Newton and Joni Mitchell walking in and out of our lives,” Minahan says. “We became friendly with Dominick Dunne as he was covering the Menendez trial. Christopher Walken lived there. It was just this exciting, vibrant place where people congregated.”
Minahan’s background to this point was in documentary filmmaking, but the strong reception of Warhol led to Series 7, a dark reality TV satire that marked his feature directorial debut. The producers of Six Feet Under were big fans of the movie, which had attained a kind of cult status, and brought him onto the landmark HBO show’s third season, at the height of its cultural impact. This then led to more robust opportunities in television. Two themes emerged within his work on dramatic series, where he could learn from big name creatives but had relatively little artistic autonomy. The first is that he found himself at the forefront of a major cinematic wave for the medium by contributing to many seminal HBO projects, including Deadwood and True Blood. The second—and there’s some overlap here—concerned Minahan dipping his toe into groundbreaking LGBTQ+ content for a mainstream American audience, itself a significant trend in the burgeoning prestige TV space.
“Maybe it was as simple as, Hey, get that gay guy, to work on the show—but I’d like to think that I was working with people who were being inclusive and trying to tell a broader story,” Minahan says. Whatever the reason—and it’s worth noting, the creators on these shows included gay men like Six Feet Under’s Alan Ball and Big Love’s Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer—he could spend stand-alone hours filming complex and surprising queer relationships, and learn the ropes of not just any kind of sex scene, but queer ones specifically. “In a series like True Blood, the was sex was extreme, and it was meant to shock, and it was transgressive,” he says. By contrast, “The way the gay characters were depicted in Six Feet Under was so fascinating. I hadn’t seen anything like that before then.”
But even the less racy, less formula-skirting work, like a few network TV gigs, provided an education. Minahan worked on Grey’s Anatomy, for example, in its glory days and absorbed a ton from watching Shonda Rhimes operate. “When you’re a documentary filmmaker, you look at the world in a certain way, and every experience is an opportunity to study human nature,” Minahan says. “This was a completely different kind of storytelling that she was doing, and from what I was doing at HBO.”
Ian Watson
Minahan developed a reputation as an efficient professional—crucial in TV—and his artistic ambitions never abated. His stamp is all over “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” the American Crime Story season that moves in stylish narrative reverse, untangling sticky themes of queerness and murder with each episodic backpedal. After years of trying and failing to get a Halston movie made with Vachon, the chance for the limited series arrived with his newfound connection to Murphy and an open option for a book on the New York fashion icon. “It was a big milestone for me,” Minahan says.
Same goes for Fellow Travelers, which is already attracting strong reviews for everything from Nyswaner’s propulsive scripts to the red-hot lead turns from Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey to, yes, Minahan’s exacting and striking filmmaking. He weaves between several timelines, an ambitious gambit that stays clean through his steady stewardship. But coming into this historical drama, he felt aligned with Nyswaner on maintaining a certain emotional immediacy. “I didn’t want there to be a distance between what the characters were feeling and experiencing and the experience of watching it so that it wouldn’t be presentational, that it would have a rawness to it,” Minahan says. “Oftentimes the camera’s handheld, especially in the scenes of intimacy where they’re the most free.” He’d rehearse the more explicit sequences, for instance, exhaustively with his actors and an intimacy coordinator before letting go once calling action: “By the time we got to set, we knew the choreography, and then we could just kind of cut loose. They gave it life.”
The sex scenes between Bomer’s weathered political staffer and Bailey’s DC newcomer are graphic, extensive, authentic—and narratively essential. The main rule for Minahan was to give each a beginning, middle, and end, treating them like any other dramatic centerpiece. It’s in the bedroom—or, occasionally, slightly more public spaces—where Fellow Travelers’ fascinatingly queer-driven take on power finds its most compelling ideas.
Adapted by Oscar nominee Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) from Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel, Fellow Travelers (premiering this fall on Paramount+ With Showtime) examines the volatile, passionate, deeply loving romance between Hawkins Fuller (Bomer), a charismatic if somewhat opaque war hero turned political staffer, and Tim Laughlin (Bailey), a religious idealist looking for his way into the DC grind. They meet at the dawn of the early-’50s Lavender Scare, in which Senator Joseph McCarthy and his chief counsel Roy Cohn purged whomever they deemed gay or lesbian from government roles—dubbing them communist sympathizers—and sparked a national moral panic around homosexuality. The series then builds into a kind of grand chronicle of queer American history, tracing the evolution of Hawk and Tim’s relationship through various eras before culminating in the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.
The project came to Bailey at a serendipitous moment. For the first time in his life, the breakout star of Bridgerton was in demand and being asked what he wanted to do next. “My answer was always, ‘Well, I’d love to do a sweeping gay love story,’ but my experience actually was that I’d never really seen them,” Bailey says. “Or if I had, I hadn’t seen actors like me and Matt play those roles.” (Both Bailey and Bomer identify as gay.) That dream opportunity abruptly presented itself in Fellow Travelers, which Bailey joined after Bomer had already signed on as both star and executive producer. “The story had been marinating with Ron for a solid decade before I ever came on board,” Bomer says. “Ron had an almost religious zeal about this project, this world, and these characters that just washed over everyone involved, and made it the profound experience that it was.”
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