Matt Bomer has a natural charm that often shows up in the characters he plays. You could spot it back in White Collar, the USA Network series he starred on from 2009 to 2014. Or in Magic Mike, where he played one of the charismatic strippers. Or more recently in Maestro, playing Leonard Bernstein’s friend and lover David Oppenheim.

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

It’s a quality that could have allowed Bomer to coast in his career, but instead the actor has purposely taken on challenging roles that have allowed him to reveal other layers to his leading-man abilities. In the 2014 TV movie The Normal Heart, Bomer starred opposite Mark Ruffalo as a closeted New York Times reporter who starts a relationship with Ruffalo’s Ned Weeks just as the AIDS crisis was starting. He lost 50 pounds for the role, and earned his first Emmy nomination.

Back on TV in Fellow Travelers, Bomer once again dove into a period piece about a closeted gay man, this time playing Hawkins Fuller, a.k.a. Hawk, a State Department employee who hides his sexuality during the height of McCarthyism. The Showtime series follows Hawk and Tim (played by Jonathan Bailey) throughout their decades-spanning love affair, while also touching on significant historical moments from the ’50s to the ’80s. It’s a tour de force performance from Bomer that earned him another Emmy nomination. Bomer, who came out publicly in 2012, spoke with Little Gold Men (listen below) about juggling so many decades, gay representation in Hollywood, and why he wants to fall flat on his face these days.

Vanity Fair: Was there anything in your research for Fellow Travelers that really surprised you?

Matt Bomer: I think it was the numbers of it all. Honestly, I didn't realize that an estimated 10,000 people lost their jobs—that’s a lot of people in government. And sadly that many of them took their own lives because their lives, which they’d worked so hard to conceal, were exposed to everyone, and their career prospects were really limited at that point. And so they just didn’t see a way forward. It was a really dark and tragic time for our community and the country as a whole.

There’s a lot of time periods for you to cover as this character. How did you approach that? I assume, because of the way TV shoots, you were jumping between decades every day?

Playing It Straight: For Queer Roles, Should an Actor’s Sexuality Matter?

There were different decades in the same day quite a bit. I think we learned at a certain point to stop doing the ’80s first and then go into the ’50s because of the aging makeup. They basically put kind of a diluted superglue on my face to glue wrinkles together and exacerbate existing wrinkles—it’s really hard to wash off. So all of a sudden I’d be in the ’50s looking 60 years old and it wasn’t a good combination. But oftentimes we’d work in multiple decades in the same day. I had the blessing of time to really work before I got started with a movement coach and I had a little a warm up I did with myself, depending on what the decade was, so that I knew where that lived in my body, and where the character was emotionally, and what he wanted at that time in his life, and what he was in denial of at that time in his life. And I think I was really the beneficiary of getting to be a part of Maestro right before I started filming this. I got to watch Bradley [Cooper] and Carey [Mulligan] go through the decades.

And my character even time traveled in that piece as well. So it was a nice little warm up.

Hawk has so many different sides of him. What was the most difficult part of his character for you to come to grips with?

I think you’re always your character’s defense attorney, and so, your job is to be subjective. It’s even hard for me now, a year later, after the show came out—and really two years after we started filming it—to be objective about Hawk, because my whole job was to see him subjectively and to understand that he was doing what he had to do to survive. And because of the conditioning he had between his father and the military and his experiences in life—that everyone he loved and either died or was lost to him—really conditioned him to be the kind of survivor he was. And the stakes of the game he’s playing are very real.

I’ve been wondering if this show—with gay actors playing gay characters—could have even been made five or 10 years ago. Were there still little hurdles or notes you got that felt challenging in that way?

I think the real difference for me is 10 years ago, I think it could have been made—I don’t know if it would have been made in the same way—but I don’t think I ever would have seen the script. Typically when you have these incredibly well-drawn multidimensional characters—if they are members of the LGBTQ community—for financing purposes or whatever they would go straight to an A-list straight actor and they would be given that opportunity. And I’m not draconian about who should play what or anything like that. I’m just so grateful that we’re in a time where I would even get to see the script and have an opportunity to play the role.

But that conversation is still ongoing. The fact of it is we’ve had two openly gay actors nominated for Oscars for leading man, and there are still barriers. What’s your current perspective after your own experiences?

It’s such a nuanced question and ultimately it’s kind of a sociopolitical one. So as an artist, it’s very hard for me to just speak to the zeitgeist or, or what’s going on sociopolitically. I feel like the best actor should always get the role, however they identify themselves or whether they choose to identify themselves or not. I think everyone should just have the opportunity to compete for that role, so that it is a more fair and balanced playing field.

I was really lucky to work with Diahann Carroll on White Collar, a show I did for a while here in New York. She was so iconic to me for so many reasons, and she was the first woman of color to have her own prime time drama series [Julia, which ran from 1968-1971]. I remember asking her, just out of curiosity, but obviously out of my own hidden agenda to being a gay leading man on a prime time show, “What was that like for you and how did you approach it?” And she said, “I just thought of myself as an actor. I just thought of myself as an actress playing a role. I didn’t take on any of that. I didn’t worry about any of that. I just tried to do my job.” That was such an important moment for me in my career, because at the end of the day, you want to do a great job and make sure that other folks behind you have a chance.

The creator of the show, Ron Nyswaner, spoke about how the sex scenes in the show are about power, and its shifting dynamic. How did that affect your approach?

Getting to work on those scenes was so informative to me as an actor because I’ve had to do intimacy scenes for years and it’s always a day that you go, “Oh no, I have to do this. This is scary.” And I can dissociate and not really be present. What was great about these scenes and what I realized really makes a great intimacy scene is: Are the characters the same after as they were before? None of these scenes were the characters ever the same after the intimacy scene was over—something had changed in their dynamic. I also feel like the way they connected with each other was such an expression of how they related to their societal conditioning and rebelled against it or gave over to it. It was a form of therapy between the two of them. In a way, sadly, it’s the freest the characters ever are.

The show is quite meticulous in capturing the time periods. How did you approach your physicality in respect to the time period?

All I did every day is 1950s Canadian air force workout, which was something that Hawk would have done as a person in the military. It’s really just like push-ups and sit-ups and forward bends and things like that. It takes about 10 minutes, but it’s something I could do a few times a week. Because the tricky thing was going, How am I going to look the way I’m supposed to look in the ’50s, having just come out of the military, but also look the way I need to look in the ’80s? Thankfully that’s where prosthetics and bodysuits and things came in. I found this workout that Helen Mirren did on a project—you can find it online, it takes like five minutes a day.

What makes you feel most vulnerable as an actor?

Press [laughs]. I guess I’ve been doing this professionally almost 30 years now and now the vulnerability is actually what I look for. It’s actually what I’m hoping for. Depending on how many takes a director does, I’m actually kind of hoping to fall on my face now. There was a long time in my career that I was really always trying to chase a perfect take, and just get it right. Then I realized that life wasn’t that way and I got to work with a lot of great artists like Bradley Cooper and Mark Ruffalo who are always finding something new in a scene.

That sounds like a nice place to be.

Sometimes you just come home hot with shame and just exhausted, but it’s what makes the work interesting to me.