Matt Bomer is the handsome man in the good suit, and the cinema has rarely asked him for anything more. Television has, in White Collar and Fellow Travelers, and that is where his acting lives; the films so far have used him as scenery.
Fi1m perspective
In Maestro (2023) he is the man in the bed when the telephone rings. Leonard Bernstein takes the call that will put him on the Carnegie Hall podium that afternoon, throws back a curtain, and Michelle Tesoro cuts straight onto the stage. It is the best cut in the film and it comes in the first five minutes, and Bomer's David Oppenheim is the one left in the bedroom. Eleven years earlier, in Magic Mike (2012), he is Ken, and Ken works a sailor suit. That is a fair summary of what films have wanted from Matt Bomer: to look right, in the right clothes, in somebody else's scene.
We laughed out loud at the Magic Mike routines, and the sailor suit was part of it. Soderbergh keeps the camera at the back of the club so we see the whole body and the women reaching for it, and Bomer, next to Joe Manganiello's fireman and Kevin Nash's Tarzan, plays the number with the same complete absence of shame that made us laugh in the first place. It is good work. It is also the kind of work that tells you nothing about whether he can act, which for most of his film career has been the difficulty.
Television is where he has been given room. After soap work in the early 2000s, All My Children and a contract role on Guiding Light, he spent six seasons as Neal Caffrey in White Collar (2009 to 2014), a con artist in tailored suits, and the part fixed his type: charm, physical presence, good cloth. The complaint that followed him, that he was cast for his face and little else, was reasonable up to that point. The Normal Heart (2014), as Felix Turner, was the reply, a physically demanding part in period drama that critics took seriously, and Fellow Travelers (2023), as Hawkins Fuller across decades of closeted life, is the longer version of the same case. He also produced it, which suggests he knows where his chances are.
Ryan Murphy has used him five times and Darren Criss has been alongside him four, and the stories of gay lives that run through his career mostly arrive by that route. He directed an episode of American Crime Story in 2018, a series we rate, and has done voice work on Doom Patrol and Titans, which is a sensible way to keep busy when the films offer you a bedroom and a curtain.
If you want to know what he can do, do not start with the films. They have treated him as furniture, and it is not his fault the furniture was handsome. Start with the long television parts, where somebody has finally handed him a whole character rather than a costume.
Biography
Matt Bomer is an American actor. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He made his television debut in 2000 on the soap opera All My Children and later had a contract role on Guiding Light.
Bomer gained recognition for his lead role as Neal Caffrey in the series White Collar (2009–2014). His film credits include Flightplan (2005), Magic Mike (2012) and its sequels, In Time (2011), The Nice Guys (2016) and Maestro (2023), in which he played David Oppenheim. He received a Golden Globe Award and a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for his performance in the television film The Normal Heart (2014).
