New Pic From Ryan Murphy’s AIDS Drama The Normal Heart Debuts

After their success with Behind The Candelabra, HBO will be hoping for some more next year with another gay-themed movie that ended up at the pay TV network after normal funding channels turned it down – Ryan Murphy’s The Normal Heart.

Now a new image of Mark Ruffalo in the movie has arrived, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly (and you can see the previously released one below).

The film is based on Larry Kramer’s acclaimed play about the emergence of AIDS. Alongside Ruffalo, the movie stars the likes of Taylor Kitsch, Julia Roberts, Matt Bomer, Jim Parsons and Jonathan Groff.

Ruffalo takes on the lead role of Ned Weeks, who in the early 80s is one of the first people to raise an alarm about the new disease that initially was known as ‘Gay Cancer’, but later became HIV/AIDS. Big Bang Theory star Jim Parsons will be gay activist Tommy Boatwright, a role he previously took in a 2011 Broadway revival of the play.

Julia Roberts is Emma Brookner, a wheelchair bound doctor who is the only one of her peers in New York taking AIDS seriously. Matthew Bomer is set for Felix Turner, a gay fashion journalist who becomes Ned’s lover. Groff is playing an early victim of the disease called Craig, whose boyfriend, Taylor Kitsch, starts off as a closeted investment banker but eventually becomes an AIDS activist.

Larry Kramer’s play is considered one of the most important reactions to the early AIDS epidemic, written by someone who has on the front lines of the fight, such as co-founding Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP. He later wrote a follow-up, The Destiny Of Me.

HBO will air the movie sometime early in 2014.