‘Fellow Travelers’ Series Creator Ron Nyswaner Is “Not Ready To Retire” As There’s More Queer American History To Unveil
What is it like to have an all-consuming romance over the course of 30 years? Screenwriter-director Ron Nyswaner has written movies for over four decades, earning an Oscar nomination for Philadelphia, and has worked on critically acclaimed shows like Ray Donovan and Homeland. And now, with Showtime’s limited series Fellow Travelers, Nyswaner makes his debut as a TV creator.
Based on the Thomas Mallon novel, Fellow Travelers is a sweeping, tragic love story and political thriller chronicling the clandestine romance of two very different men who meet in the shadow of McCarthy-era Washington. Matt Bomer plays Hawkins Fuller, a man with a successful career in politics who generally avoids emotional entanglements — until he meets the idealistic Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey). The two begin a romance just as Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn declare war on “subversives and sexual deviants,” initiating one of the darkest periods in 20th-century American history. Over the course of three decades, we follow the pair as they cross paths through the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, the drug-fueled disco hedonism of the 1970s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s while facing obstacles in the world and themselves.
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Here, Nyswaner talks about the long journey to adapt the novel, the changes he made to the book and the importance of queer representation on television.
DEADLINE: How did you come across this Thomas Mallon book, and when did you begin adapting it?
RON NYSWANER: A friend of mine recommended another book by Thomas Mallon that I had read called Henry and Clara, which was a great book. So that made me seek out another book, and I read Fellow Travelers. I was really taken with the relationship between Hawk and Tim; I felt a very personal connection to Tim in some ways. I am a person of faith. I’m not like Tim, who struggles with his faith, but he struggles and his attraction to Hawk, who’s remote and unattainable. I’ve had that kind of relationship. So that really struck me. And as I’m also a historian, so to put that relationship in historical context was just my thing. I just immediately wanted to do it.
Anonymous Content optioned it for me, and this happened to coincide with me moving to Los Angeles from my home in upstate New York, where I had managed to have this screenwriting career-long distance. But, I moved to LA to be more involved with my thesis in my career and especially to get into television. So, Fellow Travelers was something I was going to create for television. This was about 12 years ago, and then I got sidetracked by the need to make a living. I was really privileged to go on to Ray Donovan for a couple of years with the great Ann Biderman, who created a genius show and then to go on with all of those geniuses on Homeland for several years. I got distracted [laughs]. Then Robbie Rogers, who’s my executive producer, and he produced My Policeman, that I had written, and I asked him to read Fellow Travelers and to tell me what he thought. He read it over a weekend and called me on Monday morning to say, “You’re crazy if you don’t pursue this, and if you don’t pursue it, Greg [Berlanti] and I will.”
So, this inspired me to create a pitch. I knew I wanted to do eight episodes, what the episodes would be, and the titles of the episodes. Somehow, in that process, I realized I wanted to expand beyond the scope of the book, which is set almost exclusively in the ’50s. When we started pitching it, it was just the right time. I’ve been out here a long time with the LGBTQ projects of mine that people know of and ones that people don’t know of because they didn’t get made. Pitching this was just the right time because we had multiple offers, but I went with my home, Showtime, which I had worked with for so long, and it was really a dream.
DEADLINE: What does the title Fellow Travelers mean?
NYSWANER: Fellow Travelers is a historical reference in the ’40s and ’50s, the fellow traveler was sometimes how someone who might be sympathetic to what was happening in Germany, to Nazism, was a fellow traveler. But in the ’50s, that morphed into a way to describe people suspected of being sympathetic to the communist cause. So, it was a very disparaging and frightening thing to be called. Joseph McCarthy actually said it in the first episode. By the way, everything McCarthy says in public, in my show, he actually said. Everything that Roy Cohn says in public, in my show, he actually said too. Every hearing is from transcripts that you see in all those hearings. So, the show is meticulously researched. The accusations about McCarthy are all genuine. So anyway, you hear Joe McCarthy get up on stage and say something about, “We have a new President,” meaning Eisenhower, “and who will have no more patience with those fellow travelers.” This means there’s a new era of anti-communism. We’re going to get rid of all those fellow travelers. So, it is glimpsed at.
Then there’s the element of these two men who go through, in my version, 35 years together on and off. So, they traveled through their lives together, even though 11 years go by without contact, but they still traveled together. A funny little story: sometimes, when crew members go away, somebody comes in for four days to be on a crew right in the middle of production. So, one of the new people was there, and halfway through shooting the show, somebody told me during lunch that he was on the phone talking to a friend, and he said, “Yeah, I’m doing this show called Fellow Travelers. I think it’s about gay time travelers.” And I thought I should pitch that show [laughs].
DEADLINE: Can you talk a bit more about the inspiration on why you expanded past the confines of the book? The book ends in the 1950s. But you change the backdrop to expand throughout the years to the AIDS crisis of the 1990s and a little beyond. What was so attractive to you about expanding?
NYSWANER: I really love drama that has high stakes. That’s what I do. I do emotional drama with high stakes. To me, melodrama or disparagingly, some might refer to it as a soap opera, that’s when people lose their emotional stakes. They might have their heart broken, or they might feel sad about something. But I think it’s really exciting when you add high stakes to it that go beyond your emotions. In this case, a love affair that could be destroyed, and if it was discovered, your life and your career could be destroyed. That puts an intense, dramatic pressure on a love story. That’s what really drew me to it, that Mr. Mallon had created this beautiful relationship. He put it at the time of the Lavender Scare, and also, because I didn’t know much about the Lavender Scare, if anything, I just felt that there’s a whole part of history that no one seemed to know about. There were 5,000 to 10,000 people, loyal government workers, who were fired and purged from the government. Their records were [tarnished], and they were marked as sexual deviants. Many of them could not get a job as a professor or a teacher. Their lives were ruined, and at one point, during these hearings, investigators recorded what they were experiencing [during these hunts]. They said that they had one suicide per week from the people that were under investigation. To me, that is a pretty significant piece of American history. I don’t know anyone who’s ever heard that, so I wanted to bring that history to light.
DEADLINE: How did you find Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey? What made them perfect for their roles?
NYSWANER: Matt came on early as an executive producer, so he was there before we even pitched it. Matt was even part of the pitches and was a very active and really helpful executive producer. What I feel Matt does is he draws you to him with his physical beauty, and there is such depth behind the characters that Matt plays. Because Hawkins had to be this remote character who was physically attractive but doesn’t want to express his thoughts and feelings, you have to have an actor of Matt’s level of skill and talent who can let you know what he’s thinking and feeling without saying anything. And I’ve watched episodes over and over with audiences, and they always know what Hawk is thinking with just a look. You cut to a closeup, and you see an expression on his face, you know that either the person he’s talking to is in trouble, about to be seduced, or about to be manipulated in some way.
Jonathan, I’ve been watching since Broadchurch. He’s perfect for Tim because there’s this need to be raw; he wears his emotions like a raw wound in some ways. Jonathan had the capacity to feel things really deeply, even unconventional things like religious faith, which the cliche version of the religious theme would be something like, oh, he learns to walk away from his faith, and his faith is oppressing him. Jonathan agreed in my first interview with him that Tim’s faith is his anchor; it’s how he gets through life. I really was so appreciative of that attitude, and that’s why, because our show doesn’t say you have to choose being an out homosexual versus being a person who believes in and has a God in their life. Tim finds a way to have both of those things, but I think the intelligence of both actors drew me to them because they are complicated characters.
DEADLINE: His struggle with religion is unique. You’ve mentioned that you’re also religious. Having made other queer-related media alongside Fellow Travelers like Philadelphia or My Policeman, how did you see yourself through your own journey and tapping into your beliefs to make art?
NYSWANER: When I was a kid, say 12 or 13, at a church camp in Pennsylvania, Frances McDormand’s father was the director of the church camp. Frances and I have known each other since we were 12- or 13-years old [laughs]. I had an ecstatic religious experience, and I pursued that kind of religion as a teenager. So, I spoke in tongues, and my parents were horrified, by the way. We went to a very standard Protestant church, where you didn’t make too much noise, you didn’t sing too loud. So, I didn’t speak in tongues in that church. But, as I think in many ways, we were all looking to have those transcendent experiences. So, my first one was with God. Then I came out in the ’70s and had other kinds of extended experiences: having romances, dancing all night to Donna Summer, and becoming politically active. I went to my first gay rights demonstration in 1977 in Pittsburgh and found that that also was a way to have this kind of powerful experience bigger than yourself, to be part of a political movement bigger than myself.
It was sort of like being part of a religion that was bigger than myself. And then, it’s fairly well known that I became an alcoholic and a drug addict for years, and it got very, very dark, and I was looking for those ecstatic experiences that way, and then I became addicted to them. And so, that has been my journey through it, and I got sober, and now I have faith in something that is unknowable. I just know that there’s something that makes things happen in the universe, and there’s gravity, and it’s cool, there’s the ocean, and they’re somehow important. So, I just really wanted to wrestle with that because I do find that a lot of times, there’s the cliche that you have to choose to be religious, or you have to choose to be a politically progressive LGBT activist. And it’s not true. Unfortunately, the white nationalist Christian right has tried to take ownership of religion, and there is a history of a Christian left.
DEADLINE: Let’s talk about some of the other original characters you added: Marcus and Frankie. Why was adding them important? Specifically, I thought it was so interesting to have that conversation between Marcus and Jerome about the nuanced layers of discrimination between being a Black male and then also being a Black gay male.
NYSWANER: I felt I couldn’t create a television show in 2022/2023 that only had white characters in it. I thought that I knew that early on that that was not the morally right thing to do. Especially Black, white, queer characters, because people need to see themselves in things. And so, I knew I wanted to create Black characters, and I did approach it with respect even though I know that I don’t really really know what it’s like to walk down the street, where I can sort of sometimes hide the fact that I’m LGBTQ. Not always, when I was a kid, I couldn’t hide it. Everyone knew. I got beat up on the school bus all the time, so they knew something I didn’t even know. But that is a very different experience.
I wanted to invent those characters. It was a challenge to weave them into Hawk’s story. I didn’t want to do a soap opera kind of approach, where we just check in with Marcus now and he has no connection to the main plot. So, we did it all throughout Fellow Travelers. I relied on a lot of research. There were these great Black journalists in the ’50s. The Black newspaper business was thriving. There were a few hundred Black newspapers all across the United States that would have stringers in Washington D.C., meaning the paper could be in Cleveland or Pittsburgh, but they have somebody in Washington covering politics. And there were a couple of people, there was actually a Black woman [Ethel Payne] who was in Eisenhower’s White House Press Corps, and he would make it a point every now and then to ask her the first question. So, to see [that in my research], and of course, it was groundbreaking. It wasn’t a small thing especially, but I thought, this is it. I can put Marcus as a journalist. And then I added him in the military, he’s a vet, Hawk is a vet, and they met at some point as fellow soldiers and had sex. Clearly, they had a sexual encounter. By the way, there was a scene that told their backstory, that didn’t make it into the final cut. And also, I wanted Hawk to have somebody who would call him out on stuff, someone who would say, “You’re full of shit,” about certain things. And that is the character that Marcus became. And I just want to also say to honor Jelani [Alladin] and Noah [Ricketts], there was a conversation among us about who Marcus and Frankie were and their experiences and Jelani and Noah’s experiences. Jelani kept a journal during the shooting that he wrote in Marcus’s voice. Jelani would come into my office every now and then and read sections of Marcus’s journal to me. And some of that stuff worked its way in, especially the lines that you were just referring to that he says to Jerome in the finale.
Brandon Hines is a Black gay man who was in our writer’s room, and I would rely on Brandon to truth check me that their experience was a genuine emotional experience.
DEADLINE: The show is getting so much recognition in the intricate ways that sexuality and queerness is depicted. It’s almost like a no-holds-barred. Sometimes, there’s a cute cutaway or something, but it’s clear that the characters are having sex. What has been some joys about carrying this type of show? And was there anything that you were like, “Oh, maybe Showtime will be like, ‘Maybe that’s too much.'”
NYSWANER: Well, the executives always said, “Take it as far as you can within the law.” [laughs]. Sex, especially between what I know about the sexual relationships between gay men, is very, very important to our lives. It’s not just something that we do. It is something that actually shapes and forms us. Those relationships have a quality of power to them. And those relationships are, they have a quality to them of power. So, Dan Minahan, the director and EP, and I decided early on that every scene in the show, but especially the sex scenes, are about power. It’s about, in this moment, I have power over you, because you want something from me. I’m going to give you something to get some power from you. And that sounds kind of manipulative, and maybe that might strike some people as negative. But actually, I think the way we’re presenting it is kind of exciting. It was part of the excitement when Tim, in episode one, wants to go to the party, and he ends up with Hawk’s foot in his mouth. That was a meme moment [laughs]. But he’s realizing, “Oh, I’m wanted sexually. That gives me some power.” And it actually elevates him in a way. He becomes less of a victim and more of a person who becomes aware of his sexual power. So we wanted to chart that throughout the whole show. And so, it was just, we knew every episode had to have some version of sex in it that actually was different from the episode before. And literally, it was different. In the writer’s room, we had a rule that we wouldn’t repeat a sex act, which I have to say by the time we got to episode eight, we were a little concerned, because what haven’t they done? What orifice has not been used? But we figured it out [laughs].
DEADLINE: You’ve been in the industry for well over three decades. So to be a part of this show and to get recognized by your peers for carrying this emotionally and politically resonant show that stars several queer male leads, how are you feeling?
NYSWANER: This sounds so fake and phony, but it is true. It’s actually really humbling because, for any of us who’ve been in this business for a few decades, you know, even for a few years, it’s so hard to get something made. And then it’s so hard to get it made well, because there’s so many factors. And so many people came together, from the executives, who early on were saying, “Go for it. Let’s do this. We support this. Think bigger, be more sexual. Be provocative.” To this incredible cast, who show up and say, “Yeah, what do you want me to do? So you want me to suck on his toe? Yeah. Great. Let’s do it.” And all of my designers, everybody who arrived in Toronto… it reminded me of 30 years ago in Philadelphia that everybody arrived there to give everything they had to give. And we created this family. So, I get really moved by the fact that the family that we created in Toronto, working together for a year or so, has expanded to all these people that, on social media, who are writing to me all these beautiful, personal notes about their own lives and their own struggles, and what Fellow Travelers means to them. So, let me put it this way: I could retire and feel satisfied. But I’m not ready to retire.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]
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