At the top of 2022, Matt Bomer felt his career momentum stalling a bit. Then Barbie came calling. The audition offer compelled the actor to direct himself for a remote recording and send the tape along to the film’s casting team, who were considering him as one of the Mattel production’s many Kens. “I recorded it on my own, played a bunch of different Kens—and I dressed differently for all of them,” Bomer reveals. “I recorded the lines of the other person’s dialogue on my recorder and then gave myself space to respond.” He then spoke with director Greta Gerwig about joining the blockbuster, but ultimately walked away from the opportunity, choosing not to spend extensive time away from his family.

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This decision, painful as it might seem in the wake of Barbie’s mammoth success, proved inadvertently auspicious. Right after Barbie came and went, Bomer auditioned for Bradley Cooper to play his lover in Maestro—and got the part. All the while, a TV project Bomer had spent years developing, the Showtime historical limited series Fellow Travelers, finally got the greenlight to go into production in the summer of 2022.

Over Zoom, days after the SAG-AFTRA strike’s conclusion, Bomer takes a breath remembering the whirlwind—a new kind of feeling for an actor who’s been a steady screen presence for 25 years. “Last year was wild,” he says.

For all of the commercial and critical success Bomer has enjoyed, these milestones mark a significant new career chapter. He’s been the lead of a hit TV show in White Collar (which may soon find a second life), won awards for his wrenching performance in HBO’s The Normal Heart, starred in major Hollywood franchises like DC’s Doom Patrol and FX’s American Horror Story. Across those projects, he’s wielded his classically handsome features to mask characters of deep pain or torment, that spectacularly coiffed hair and all-American smile selling a crumbling fantasy. Of late, this goes particularly for his characters’ sexuality. Since publicly coming out as gay more than a decade ago, in the midst of White Collar’s run on USA Network, Bomer’s place in the industry changed. Opportunities shrunk. Doors closed. But others opened, and as he continues to walk through them, he’s getting more interesting as a performer—deeper, bolder, freer.

So maybe 2022’s barrage of new projects, even the one that didn’t ultimately work out, came about at the right time. “You get to a place where, when an opportunity like this comes along, you just don’t want to fuck it up,” Bomer says. “At a certain point, you’ve just got to keep moving forward and not wait for society to catch up to you.”

As with his characters, Bomer’s charm—and savvy—is undeniable in conversation. He’s unfailingly polite, smooth, and on message. He knows what to say. He anticipates questions better than most in his position, and smartly sidesteps them when he’d rather not answer in-depth. (“I won’t bore you with the details,” he says multiple times.) A lifetime of learning to navigate a wide range of spaces—and, more recently, doing so as his authentic self—goes into this presentation. “The stakes for me being out in high school, to me, were life and death, whether that was social death, familial death—whatever it was,” the Texas-raised Bomer says. “I had constructed a public persona that would allow me to survive and at least attempt to thrive.”

Bomer has never been better than in Fellow Travelers, which is midway through its run on Showtime. He portrays Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller, a closeted Senate staffer in McCarthy-era Washington, DC, whose chiseled, secretive mask slips off as he falls for a young idealogue named Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey). The series, developed by a range of queer industry veterans including Oscar-nominated creator Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) and Emmy-winning director Daniel Minahan (Halston), spans decades in its ambitious portrait of a sweeping gay love story. The forbidden romance unfolds against a brutal political backdrop. We begin in the Lavender Scare, a mass Cold War panic connecting LGBTQ+ people to communism, and end in the AIDS crisis. Bomer is, of course, of a different generation than Hawk, but sees the parallels between the character and his own coming of age: “I had experienced a lot of the tools that Hawk was using to survive.”

Fellow Travelers depicts Hawk as a true antihero. Bomer is so good because he’s tapping into something dark here. This is a figure of tremendous fear and self-interest, who out of an ugly upbringing has built an enviable life up from nothing—including an impending marriage to a senator’s daughter—even if it’s based on a lie. (There’s a reason comparisons to Don Draper have persisted.) The negotiation between holding onto that stability and pursuing his feelings for Tim lead to a series of complex, difficult, at times vicious choices that reflect the impossibility of the closeted person’s position—if also Hawk’s particular skill at bifurcating his identities to move forward.

“What was fun about this character is that I got to be the bad boy,” Bomer says. “My strategy was always to be the good boy as a kid. So I actually got to externalize and have fun with a lot of things that I never had the opportunity to do—when I was in a circumstance that was comparable to Hawk’s in some ways.” Nyswaner was taken by the level of detail in the performance. “The editors and I would cut to Matt in any situation, any take, and you would know exactly what Hawk is thinking and feeling. He’ll do nothing, or he’ll move his face slightly, or he’ll do something with his eyes. You literally see thoughts rippling through his face.”

Bomer unleashes Hawk’s innermost self during vivid sex scenes with Tim that lay out the couple’s complex power dynamics. They are hot, they are intense, and they are strangely heartbreaking in their horny abandon. The moment Bomer gets back to adjusting that tie, his generously warm smile turns cold. Yet there’s still a glow to these sequences, thanks to the intimate chemistry between Bomer and Bridgerton star Bailey, who is also gay. “It was such a gift to get to see what Johnny had come up with and what he was bringing to the table as an actor—the life experience that I could see in his eyes,” Bomer says.

Many of those associated with Fellow Travelers, adapted from Thomas Mallon’s novel, infused elements of personal experience to the making of the show, from the individualized fear of coming out to the memory of a spirited ’70s Fire Island getaway. As an executive producer, Bomer developed the series for years with Nyswaner, for whom this has long been a passion project. “I owe him a lot,” the creator says. “Matt was the leader in showing everybody, ‘This is what we’re all going to do, folks—we’re going to give everything that we have.’”

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.”