Ned Weeks is stubborn, irascible and, at times, even unlikable — just the kind of soldier needed during the early years of the battle against HIV-AIDS.
Ned (Mark Ruffalo) is at the center of HBO's The Normal Heart (Sunday, 9 p.m. ET/PT), a film adaptation of Larry Kramer's 1985 play that centers on a group of gay men in New York who band together to fight a mysterious disease first identified as a "gay cancer" that eventually claims people from all walks of life.
Ned, a screenwriter and Kramer's alter ego, is the raging voice in a cast of characters based on real people that includes his eventual lover, New York Times reporter Felix Turner (Matt Bomer); the closeted banker and military man Bruce Niles (Taylor Kitsch); and a deceptively steely Southerner, Tommy Boatwright (Jim Parsons).
MORE: The message of 'Heart' still beats loudly
Ned confronts everyone from government officials who don't respond out of fear, ignorance or prejudice to his loving but homophobic brother, Ben (Alfred Molina), to other gay men, many of whom do not want to give up hard-fought sexual freedom in order to avoid infection.
"He was a prophet. He saw it as an existential threat in a way that nobody else did. ... He's running from person to person trying to relate the truth of what is coming and no one wants to believe it," Ruffalo says. "What do you do but scream and yell and try to get attention? He understood that that was his place and it was brutal to him."
At one point in the film, directed by Ryan Murphy from Kramer's screenplay adaptation, Ned is thrown out of the activist group he started by its members. It's led, instead, by the more discreet Bruce, who had lost his lover to AIDS and chooses to work quietly and cooperatively with potential allies.
Ned and Bruce "want to end up at the same point, but just have entirely different views and ways of getting there," says Kitsch, adding that the disease takes an emotional toll on all of them. "Everyone there was dealing with their own demise, their own demons, their own fear, their own mourning."
Ned and the others are joined in their fight by Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts), a dedicated physician who is familiar with the dangers of viral disease from her own struggle with childhood polio. Roberts had turned down the role, based on the real-life. Linda Laubenstein, in an earlier attempt to film the play, but the character finally connected with her after she watched a documentary on polio.
"I suddenly realized that the mystery, the fear, the pandemonium that polio caused, it was the same thing in her mind that was happening with AIDS. People didn't know where it was coming from, how it was being transmitted, what was going to happen," says Roberts. "Suddenly, I understood how she was so relentless and furious and (why she) just would not stop trying to fix it."
As Ned wages his fight, he also falls in love with Felix, who is emboldened by his new partner even as he becomes sick with the disease.
"One of the things that's so heartbreaking about their relationship is that they both have things that complement each other. Ned is a firebrand and his chutzpah enables Felix to come to terms with parts of himself that he might not have in a relationship that was more staid. And I think Felix's patience and love tempers Ned's fire," says Bomer, who lost a dramatic amount of weight during a production break – "I stopped weighing myself (after dropping) 35 pounds" – in order to portray the physical ravages of AIDS.
Parsons felt a special sense of camaraderie with his colleagues in both the film and a 2011 Broadway production.
"While this is not a war movie in a literal sense, you are a group of people in battle together and every scene that you're in with these other men and women, you are fighting for a united cause. You're in it together," he says.
The actors say they are honored to be part of Kramer's work and to portray the real-life activists whose legacy goes beyond fighting AIDS.
"As horrific as the disease is and was, it did bring people together and created a voice that still resonates today. We need to recognize that we stand on their shoulders to have a lot of rights that we have today, like marriage," says Bomer, who is married to Simon Halls and has three children. "We owe so much to Larry. He was somebody who stood up at a time when it was massively unpopular to do so."
Source : http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2014/05/21/hbo-adapts-normal-heart-with-mark-ruffalo-julia-roberts-jim-parsons/9348269/
