THR: Your next project is Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, about the rise of the HIV-AIDS crisis in early 1980s New York, which you pursued aggressively. Why?
Murphy: It was a property that I paid for out of my own pocket and then I fought to get it made. It scares me because I came of age sexually in the early 1980s, and I lost so many friends, and so it means a lot to me. I really want young people to know what it used to be like and how that disease is still with us in a very deadly, horrible way. Larry and I have been working on this script for a year and a half, and every page has some sock to the stomach emotionally. There’s a three-page scene in there that I can barely read, let alone direct, which is about what it’s like to be a caregiver when somebody’s dying and throwing up and having diarrhea in your arms. [x]
“I’m furious with you, and with myself, and every goddamn doctor who ever told me I’m sick and interfered with my loving a man. I’m just… I’m trying to understand why nobody wants to hear that we’re dying. Why nobody wants to help. Why my own brother doesn’t want to help.”
The Normal Heart (2014): Mark Ruffalo as Ned Weeks & Matt Bomer as Felix Turner
