PODCAST | Angelo Acerbi interviews Pekka Strang, actor of the film Tom of Finland.
Pekka Strang is the lead actor of the biopic about Tom of Finland; he plays the illustrator himself, throughout the tale of the man’s life, from his beginnings in Finland to his over-the-top life in Los Angeles. Pekka was initially worried about playing such a huge personality, from his own country. Here he tells us how he found the right way to do it.
Tom of Finland: finally on the big screen, a biography of Tom of Finland, the brilliant illustrator who contributed to inventing and recording the imagery of the leather fetish: leather, uni- forms, muscles, giant penises. The years of his youth in rural Finland, where there did not seem to be a place for gay people like him. Then came the Second World War, which allowed him to discover his fascination with powerful and authoritarian male beauty, of which he found examples among his fellow soldiers and among the enemy troops. After the war, he moved to Helsinki, where he lived and worked as an advertising designer with his sister Kaija: here he created his iconic pictures, which were seen all over the world even though homoerotic pornography was illegal everywhere, and made him a timeless artist. And then there is his relationship with dancer Veli, which would last their lives, despite the disapproval of his sister and the backward views of Finnish society.
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