Glee's Ryan Murphy on the Biggest Labor of Love of His Career

So, what's the high point of Glee and American Horror Story co-creator Ryan Murphy's career? Was it making Lea Michele a household name? Restaging “Turkey Lurkey Time” with Sarah Jessica Parker? Convincing Jessica Lange and Sarah Paulson to rock out to “The Name Game”? Nope, nope and nope.

This spring, the starry HBO adaptation of Larry Kramer’s 1985 Tony-winning drama The Normal Heart will debut on the small screen—and the only person more excited than we are is the director and co-screenwriter. Murphy told Entertainment Weekly, “Of everything I’ve ever done in my career, I think [The Normal Heart] is the biggest labor of love.”

"It’s a movie about AIDS, but it’s also really a civil rights movie,” adds Murphy, who collaborated with Kramer for three years to adapt the film’s script. “I think it’s more timely than ever before. It’s really about the quest to be seen, not as a gay person or a straight person but just a person…It’s an activist movie that also has a really great love story in it.”

Kramer, who recently told Broadway.com Murphy is “obsessively obsessed” with the film, isn’t kidding around! The Normal Heart will star Julia Roberts, Mark Ruffalo, Jim Parsons (who starred in the 2011 Broadway production), Alec Baldwin, Taylor Kitsch, Jonathan Groff, Joel Grey, Alfred Molina and Joe Mantello.

The Normal Heart, a moving and groundbreaking portrayal of the HIV/AIDS crisis in New York City during the early 1980s, originally premiered off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 1985. It opened on Broadway for the very first time in 2011 and won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.