“For most authors, it is a great compliment and blessing to have your book turned into a movie. The movie will expose my book to a wider audience and, if anything, will be a great story to tell my grandkids while I am on the rocking chair some day,” Ken Baker told HollywoodLife.com while promoting the new film The Late Bloomer, a rom-com based on Ken’s autobiographical, Man Made: A Memoir of My Body.
At 27, Ken discovered he had a pituitary tumor in his brain that stunted his testosterone; when he removed it, in brought about a second puberty, which is the story of The Late Bloomer, starring Johnny Simmons, JK Simmons and Brittany Snow.
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“This whole experience is also somewhat healing for me. I mean, I went through hell, and revealed it in my memoir, but to have that turned into a romantic comedy has been quite cathartic for me,” Ken told us. “A part of that process is that, when you option your life rights to Hollywood producers, you also have to be willing to ‘let it go’ and allow them to make a movie that is a good movie on its own merits, which means not being hung up on details and how the movie might stray from my real story.”
He added he was able to “step back and see the humor” in the situation, which was healthy for him. “It is just so gratifying to see such a great movie be made out of my awkward male misery,” he said. “The film is one of those special movies that makes you both laugh and cry. Those are my favorite kinds of movies.”
As for the illness he went through, Ken says now, it’s made him stronger — and it hasn’t been easy.
“The struggle is the journey, but, luckily, there is a happy ending to mine so far,” he said. “Even so, it was quite a traumatic experience for me to have that brain tumor messing up my body and mind, and it definitely took me a long time to heal from it and the anxiety that came along with having a body at war with itself for so long. Let’s face it: no one goes to war without coming back with battle scars. But, mostly, I am just grateful for all of it. I mean that. I meditate and pray every day, and I always say a prayer of gratitude for all the good and all the bad, because both are great teachers. In fact, I have learned more things from the bad stuff, including that meddling brain tumor and other times in my life when things just haven’t gone my way.”
The Late Bloomer comes out in theaters on Oct. 7.