Trivia / The Normal Heart

• Ability over Appearance: Or in this case, Ability Over Sexuality. Mark Ruffalo initially hesitated to take the role of Ned Weeks in the HBO film, questioning director Ryan Murphy as to whether a straight man should be playing one of the landmark characters of gay theater. Murphy rather bluntly told Ruffalo that he wanted the best actor for the role, sexuality be damned, and Ruffalo was it. Ruffalo proved him right, and then some.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Filming was actually halted for a month so Matt Bomer (Felix Turner) could lose forty pounds to portray a man dying from AIDS. He actually lost so much muscle mass that he was too weak to move very much between takes.
  • He actually moved out of his family home after the first few weeks of crash dieting because he didn't want to scare his kids with his appearance.
• Executive Meddling: This was originally supposed to be a feature film, but no film studio would touch it due to the subject matter. HBO did what HBO does best and rescued it, turning it into a TV film instead.
• Playing Against Type: Jim Parsons (a.k.a. Sheldon Cooper) is a borderline example. As Tommy Boatwright, he's still sweet, Southern, and quirky, but he smokes, he curses, and at one point he punches a homophobic protester in the face.
• Queer Character, Queer Actor:
  • Several stage productions have featured queer actors:
    • The original 1985 off-Broadway production starred Brad Davis as Ned.
    • During its 1986 run in London, Ned was briefly played by Tom Hulce.
    • A 2004 off-Broadway revival had Raúl Esparza as Ned.
    • The 2011 Broadway run starred Joe Mantello as Ned, John Benjamin Hickey as Felix, Lee Pace as Bruce, and Jim Parsons as Tommy (which he’d later reprise for the HBO version).
    • A 2011-12 Toronto production starred Jonathan Wilson (who’s gay) as Ned.
    • The 2021 National Theatre production starred Ben Daniels as Ned.
  • The HBO adaptation has many of its gay characters played by gay actors, including Matt Bomer (Felix), Jim Parsons (Tommy), Joe Mantello (Mickey), B.D. Wong (Buzzy), Stephen Spinella (Sanford), Denis O'Hare (Hiram), and Jonathan Groff (Craig). (Mark Ruffalo (Ned) and Taylor Kitsch (Bruce) are the sole exceptions.^note Interestingly, Ruffalo actually questioned film director Ryan Murphy about whether he, a straight man, should be playing one of the landmark characters of gay theater, and was told quite bluntly by Murphy that he wanted the best actor for the role and Ruffalo was it.)
• Write What You Know: The Normal Heart is about one of the founders of the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), the first activist organization in the United States formed to speak up for a community being ravaged by a disease no one understood — and was written by one of the founders of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, who lived through the epidemic and saw dozens of his friends die of the disease.