‘Fellow Travelers’ Indeed — How Ron Nyswaner and Matt Bomer Created a Queer Masterpiece with Their First Project Together
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Ron Nyswaner and Matt Bomer can’t quite agree about their first meeting. “Look at how we collaborate,” Bomer said with a laugh over a Zoom call with Nyswaner and IndieWire.
In fact, the retelling of their initial meeting (“You take this one, Ronnie,” Bomer said before quickly backtracking when he realized Nyswaner was skipping over their first Zoom call. “Never mind, scratch that”) is their “Fellow Travelers” partnership in microcosm. Both Nyswaner (who created the show) and Bomer (its star and executive producer) are able to quickly step in when the course needs correcting, and both are comfortable enough with one another not to let ego interfere.
That easy relationship translated into one of the greatest LGBTQ series ever made, one that is as sexy as it is political. (Quick, think of any other series with two gay male lead characters that goes as hard in both directions as “Fellow Travelers.”) After their Zoom call and an in-person meeting at San Vincente Bungalows — Nyswaner’s initial reply about where they first met — Bomer and Nyswaner understood a few things. One, they really loved Thomas Mallon’s novel that the series would adapt. And two, they intuitively understood how much work would be required to bring it to life.
Starting with getting a greenlight.
“Things take a while to develop. And the way things are done, often, is that there’s no guaranteed green light until many, many, many things have been accomplished, like several scripts and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” Nyswaner said. “And Matt just kept holding on and juggling his schedule. And that was really significant because I couldn’t really imagine someone else playing Hawkins Fuller.”
“I mean, I was taking jobs hoping to just incentivize Showtime to move faster and greenlight our show,” Bomer chimed in.
“Yeah. There were frantic calls from me to certain people saying, ‘We’re gonna lose Matt, please, please make this happen as fast as possible,'” Nyswaner said.
“Anything to move the needle,” Bomer added.
Is it any wonder that both men were passionate about the chance to bring to the screen Mallon’s tortured lovers Hawkins Fuller and Tim Laughlin — ultimately played by Bomer and Jonathan Bailey — when their epic romance is the kind of invigorating, enthralling love story queer audiences rarely get? Except that wasn’t quite enough. Mallon’s novel came out in 2007, and 2023 audiences wouldn’t accept a story that dug deep into the Lavender Scare of the ’50s without also exploring the even less-told stories of queer people of color. And Nyswaner had some other ideas up his sleeve.
“The story is so moving, and I knew Ron, just from his work over the years, was the perfect person to interpret that material,” Bomer said, pointing to the eight years Nyswaner had spent with the story prior to their meeting. “And he also had his own vision for the source material. And I thought that his vision in terms of that, bringing Marcus and Frankie to the story and expanding it through these huge historic events in our country’s history and our community’s history, I thought would make it really cinematically interesting and carry over into eight hours’ worth of material.”
Nyswaner stuck with the project partly because Hawk and Tim “really haunted me. I sort of just wanted to be in bed with them. Or watching, I think. But to spend time with them, knowing that I was going to be spending probably a few years of my life with them, just really was something I wanted to do.” Likewise, he knew instinctively that Tim would die of AIDS, making that bleak decade in which the American government ignored its queer community a bookend to the Lavender Scare.
“They had both been caused, one by our government’s active persecution of gay people and one by our government’s indifference to us,” Nyswaner said. “So that just seemed natural. And then you had to fill it in. Like, I can’t wait 30-plus years for them to see each other. I gotta figure out some other ways. So it was very practical, actually.” Filling in those decades brought with it stories about racism within and without the queer community, gender identity, the Vietnam War, the White Night riots in the aftermath of Harvey Milk’s assassination, and more.
Bomer points to the care and forethought that Nyswaner lavished on “Fellow Travelers” even before production, calling his deeply considered ideas about everything from production design to score “pretty much bulletproof.”
“As a producer, what I could bring to the table was more relationships. I made myself amenable to any chemistry reads that we had,” Bomer said. “But even those, we had such a fantastic casting director that it was just a matter of [the perfect people] coming in and reading. My thing as a producer is I don’t ever make an executive decision on another actor because I don’t want that karma on my shoulders!” And of course, Bomer relied on his 20 years in episodic TV to weigh in on anything that might benefit from his experience.
All true, according to Nyswaner, but also not quite the full picture. “On the set, Matt’s commitment to the show extended beyond showing up and giving a great performance,” he said before addressing Bomer. “On the set, how welcoming you are to day players or people with small parts. I know that it adds a burden to the person who has to, in the next few minutes, give a performance, but I watched you do that and just being a leader. And as nice a guy as Matt might be it does mean that little extra bit of energy you have to give because these people have to be inspired. And I always felt that Matt was Number 1 on the call sheet in every way.”
“If I was able to behave in that way, it’s only because I’ve been shown great examples from people I’ve worked with in the past,” Bomer replied. “And you understand when you’ve been a part of something for a while, and you have the responsibility of being a producer as well, you want to give love to all the ingredients that go into the pot. But on set, if it did take an effort when you’re exhausted and it’s hour 70 or whatever it is, I find that’s always worth it because even if it’s just making an effort to ingratiate yourself with someone who’s there for the day or the scene, it, it bleeds into the scene work. It adds an accessibility and a comfortability and a collaboration once the work is up and running.”
As for telling another story together in the future? Bomer is keen. “I’ve tried!” he said. “I’ve courted him so many times, he’s such a recalcitrant collaborator. He’s gonna wait till it’s the right one, and I respect that, and I get that. But, listen, I’m here with open arms, Ron.”
“Yeah, hey, Matt, same here,” Nyswaner replied. “Send a book, whatever!”
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