Paul Reubens spent more than 40 hours discussing his life and career in the months before his 2023 death for the new two-part HBO documentary 'Pee-wee as Himself'.

And Reubens knew as he gave his forty brief hours of sit-down interviews for it that this documentary was going to end up being his last chance at shaping his story the way he wanted to—he’d been secretly fighting cancer for several years (even the filmmakers didn’t know this) and he passed away on July 30th 2023 still in the middle of its making,

On July 31, 2023, the news of Reubens' death came as a shock to documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf, who had spent a year trying to convince him to make the ambitious two-part documentary “Pee-wee as Himself,” now streaming on HBO Max, and over 40 hours interviewing him on camera.