The Late Paul 'Pee-wee' Reubens Defends Himself

"Death is just so final," the late Paul Reubens says in a trailer for a self-narrated docuseries that debuted Friday. "To be able to get your message in at the last minute is incredible." That's what Reubens, better known by his character Pee-wee Herman, pulls off in HBO's Pee-wee as Himself, a two-part documentary filmed as Reubens was battling cancer, though not even director Matt Wolf knew that at the time. "I was completely unaware that he was sick," Wolf tells USA Today. "So when he died, it was a complete shock to me." Despite the timing, Reubens didn't intend for this to be a "legacy movie," the outlet notes. "I really want to set the record straight on a couple things, and that's pretty much it," he says in the footage.

The docuseries has a perfect 100% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with James Poniewozik at the New York Times calling it "a tribute to Reubens' genius and complexity." The star sat for 40 hours of interviews, opening up about his search for stardom, his beloved character, his sexual orientation, drug use, and his legal troubles. In 1991, he was accused of masturbating in an adult movie theater. A decade later, he was charged with possessing child pornography. It was all "unjust," Wolf tells USA Today. Ruebens denied the masturbation charge but pleaded no contest so he could move on. He reached a plea deal in the other case, admitting to one count of possession of obscene material, and had to register as a sex offender for three years.

But the material was related to "an art collection of gay erotica," per USA Today. The plea deal "addressed this being material that was offensive somehow, but ... not anything to do with child pornography," Reubens' attorney Blair Berk says in the series. Reubens died before he could sit for his final interview with Wolf but recorded an audio message for the series on the day before he died. "The reason I wanted to make a documentary was to let people see who I really am and how painful and difficult it was to be labeled something that I wasn't," he says in part. "I wanted somehow for people to understand that my whole career, everything I did and wrote, was based in love." (More Paul Reubens stories.)