The Savannah Film Festival, presented by the Savannah College of Art and Design, really got moving on Sunday, with Matt Bomer receiving his Spotlight Award that night. He was very gracious to the crowd and the festival, attending a Q&A session following a special screening of The Normal Heart and giving an acceptance speech before the screening of Foxcatcher.
Bomer gives easily one of the best performances in Ryan Murphy’s The Normal Heart and deserved the Emmy nomination he received. In the film, he plays Felix Turner, the only man Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) ever fell in love with. He’s the guy that helped “soften some of Ned’s rough edges,” as Bomer said after the film, although Ned also helped Felix understand the gravity of the AIDS epidemic. Sadly, Felix winds up a victim of AIDS himself and it crushes Ned and only makes him want to fight harder.
When seeing The Normal Heart, especially on a big screen, one can’t help but be surprised that it aired on TV first. This doesn’t feel like a made-for-TV movie. Bomer had actually been interested in doing it since 2011, before HBO came in.
Filming the movie was very serious business. Bomer told one student that it was a very quiet set, but Murphy could get the crew to laugh. Overall though, there were “hushed tones” on the set. Playwright Larry Kramer was also an important force, since he wrote the original play and the screenplay. Bomer said that Kramer did attend a few days of shooting, including the day Felix and Ned first met.
Although he lost a significant amount of weight for the film, Bomer said that some of the hardest scenes were the earlier moments when Felix and Ned were first falling in love. They actually filmed the movie sequentially, so their relationship is developing for the audience and the actors, too.
HBO Films President Len Amato also attended the Q&A and said that HBO had been 100 percent committed to the project. He gave a short introduction, mentioning that the film was kind of a horror movie. Which is true to some extent. It certainly is frustrating to see how an epidemic was ignored for years before anything was done by governments.
During his appearances, Bomer continued to say that during his experience making The Normal Heart, he had learned that acting can be more than just entertainment. Of course, he chuckled that the next project he’s working on - Magic Mike XXL, which is being filmed in Savannah - is a male stripper movie.
Bomer was visibly moved by picking up the award. It probably won’t make up for the Emmy loss, but SAVFF’s Spotlight Award will look pretty nifty on a shelf.
images by Daniel S Levine
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