I recently watched Tom Hanks’ Mr. Rogers movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (on Netflix), and I wasn’t expecting it to star Matthew Rhys, whom I know through The Americans and, more recently, Widow’s Bay.
Rhys plays a jaded journalist tasked with producing a puff piece on the popular children’s show host, but the experience changes him, and the piece grows into a deeply personal article that earns the cover spot on Esquire.
I may not be a jaded journalist, but I must say that my spider sense started tingling when the wife of Rhys’s character first appeared. Our White journalist in 1998 has a (light-skinned) Black wife? They wouldn’t race-swap a real-life person’s wife, would they?
Well, it turns out Rhys’s character is a made-up journalist, named Lloyd Vogel, and the actual writer was Tom Junod, who married a woman named Janet. They did not have a baby boy soon before the article came out; rather, they adopted a girl. I don’t think Junod had an estranged, alcoholic father, dying, either.