Lewis Pullman: From College to Superhero

Lewis James Pullman, an American actor, has been steadily carving a name for himself in Hollywood. The son of actor Bill Pullman and modern dancer Tamara Hurwitz, Lewis initially explored interests outside of acting, but eventually found his own path in the world of performance. He is set to take on a superhero role, having previously played a naval aviator and a chemist.

Early Life and Education

Pullman was born on January 29, 1993. He attended Wildwood School in Los Angeles for high school. At 18, Pullman enrolled at Warren Wilson College, a small liberal arts school in North Carolina. In 2015, he graduated from Warren Wilson College with a bachelor's degree in Social Work. During his time there, he volunteered at a local homeless shelter and worked on a tractor with the school’s landscaping crew. Warren Wilson College has a large working farm on campus, and Pullman said he was "on the tractor division in college".

A Creative Upbringing

Growing up, Pullman's family maintained a somewhat unconventional lifestyle. Their property in the hills of Beachwood Canyon had a barn and 60 varieties of fruit plants and trees. The kids weren’t allowed to watch TV unless they were sick, and still, the limit was two hours. Instead, Pullman spent time climbing trees, crafting wooden swords, and putting on plays with his siblings.

"You show up to school and everyone’s talking about Hey Arnold!, Dawson’s Creek or The OC or whatever and you’re like, ‘I can’t contribute here,’” he says. “I was like, ‘Why can’t I have a cellphone or laptop until I’m in 10th grade?’ I don’t know why I didn’t, like, run away or anything. I guess because the other options they laid out for us felt so good.”

Early Career

Pullman began his acting career with several short films, starting with The Tutor in 2013. After graduating college in 2015, he was asked by filmmakers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris to audition for Highston, a television series from Sacha Baron Cohen and Amazon Studios. In September 2015, his casting was confirmed and the series was given a six-episode order. The series starred Pullman in the lead role as a 19-year-old whose imaginary friends were real-life celebrities. He had to split his time between living in Los Angeles and Montana.

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He also plays the drums in the band Atta Boy alongside Eden Brolin, Freddy Reish, and Dashel Thompson.

Finding His Path in Acting

It wasn’t until college that he began to consider acting as a profession. True to form, he was drawn to the discomfort of performing-not intimidated by classes that asked him to engage in odd exercises like slinking around a black box like an animal, and which would anywhere else be considered mortifying. It didn’t leave room for his anxiety. For acting to be believable, Pullman had to surrender control.

Breakthrough Roles

Pullman's career gained significant momentum with several key roles:

The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018)

In 2018, Pullman had a leading role in the slasher film The Strangers: Prey at Night. Though the film received mixed reviews when compared to its predecessor, it was a box-office success, grossing $32.1 million against a $5 million production budget.

Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)

That same year, he starred alongside Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm, Cailee Spaeny, and Chris Hemsworth in Bad Times at the El Royale. For his performance as Miles Miller in the neo-noir thriller film, Pullman was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor. On casting Pullman, writer and director Drew Goddard said "it was one of those good old-fashioned casting searches. After meeting with lots and lots and lots of actors, Lewis came in and you just felt that immediately. The last time that happened, quite honestly, was when Chris Hemsworth walked in for The Cabin in the Woods. You're just looking for actors who inherently fit the role - and then also transcend the role.

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Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Pullman's profile rose further with his role in Top Gun: Maverick, in which he starred alongside Tom Cruise as an unassuming weapons system operator who ultimately gets chosen to fly on a risky naval mission. On Top Gun, he says, his colleagues were just as petrified as he was-but no one wanted to admit it. “I was the first one to be like, ‘Can anyone else not fucking sleep at night?’ And eventually everyone exhaled and was like ‘Yes, totally,’” he says.

Lessons in Chemistry (2023)

After a brief detour to the world of television streaming, he had his real breakout in Lessons in Chemistry. He also earned his first Emmy nomination last year with his role in Lessons in Chemistry. That was a spectacular experience for me. The whole way that it unfolded was a learning process, ‘cause I fell into it in some ways. I hadn’t read the book before I got the call and then I read the book and I was like, “This is incredible.” Genuinely, I loved that book so much and [Bonnie Garmus’] words and the character Calvin. I felt like I related to a lot of things within him, all besides the chemistry part, which is a huge part, and that is not my forte. So I was like, if I do this thing, I’m really gonna be doing the whole acting thing, ‘cause I’m gonna have to act my ass off here (Laughs) to make it believable that I know what I’m talking about. But once I met with Lee Eisenberg and Sarah Adina Smith, who did the first two episodes, and they were really compelled to find me and Brie’s kind of truth within this relationship and the chemistry is just kind of a vessel for all the thematic kind of gold that was in Bonnie’s book. So it was just a team of people who really wanted to continue the life of a book that was so beloved while also remembering that it’s kind of a fool’s errand to try and replicate a book in film or TV, it’s always gonna be different from whatever the reader had imagined in their mind, and so remembering that our best strength and best tool was doing justice to what the book meant for each one of us, and hoping that would sing true for the audience members and I think it did. I loved watching that, especially once Calvin’s story kind of vanishes, seeing what Brie did was so incredible with that character. There’s nobody else who could have played that character.

*Thunderbolts***

His character, Bob, is a former addict who enrolls in a secretive trial promising to turn civilians into super-soldiers. But even after transforming into the superpowered Sentry-who is set to become an important player in the Marvel Cinematic Universe-the dark cloud from his childhood trauma still lingers. American actor Lewis Pullman is set to take on the role of Bob and is already drawing significant buzz with the first look at his character.

Upcoming Projects and Aspirations

Moving forward, Pullman says, his aim is to forge a career that is a mix of this type of “real guerrilla warfare, in the trenches” indie work, and larger tentpole films. He just shot a 60-second Michelob Ultra commercial with Kurt Russell, which will air during the Super Bowl and paid him “way, way more” than Ann Lee. It’s the kind of balance his dad has been able to maintain over the years, oscillating between summer hits like Independence Day and David Lynch’s Lost Highway. The two of them just spent three months in Australia working together for the first time on a sequel to Spaceballs, the Mel Brooks comedy that Pullman senior was part of in 1987.

Pullman isn’t shy about asking for advice, either from his dad-they talk through the part before each of his projects-or other industry elder statesmen, like Cruise. On Top Gun, the actor shared with Pullman that after he finishes a movie, he watches it and then establishes his own opinion of the work. Next, he’ll seek out data about how the movie was received by the public and create a median opinion, the lessons of which he takes to his next project. Since hearing about this, Pullman has started tracking his own progress. After filming a scene, he’ll write down how he felt about his performance in a journal so that he can eventually compare his notes with the final outcome.

He really wanna try and weasel my way into the David Gordon Green, Danny McBride world. I think that is one of my favorites. They’ve kind of created their own genre of comedy and it’s right up my alley in so many ways, and it looks like so much fun that they’re having.

Personal Life and Influences

Lewis Pullman is the youngest son of renowned actor Bill Pullman, known for classic 90s blockbusters including Independence Day (1996) and While You Were Sleeping (1995); and his wife, Tamara Hurwitz, a modern dancer and choreographer. Despite his own extensive acting career, Pullman Sr thinks of his son as the better actor. He now heeds his father’s “invaluable” advice often.

He comes from a family of creatives. "I think that’s what is so undeniably fortunate about nepotism … what’s the hardest to get is the opportunity to get experience and to find your comfortability within a very bizarre circumstance,” he explains to The Hollywood Reporter. "We were a very creative family, you know, we were all very artistic and performative and putting on shows and plays in our minds and for each other growing up. So somewhere in the arts was always where I was gonna land."

He also notes: "I think anxiety has been a big one that has followed me around my whole life, and so making it a friend and knowing that it’s actually there for a reason and that it’s actually trying to help you and kind of distinguishing when it’s right and when it’s wrong, but not shaming yourself for it. And figuring out how many different shapes it can take, and anxiety doesn’t always look like anxiety. So kind of morphing it and kind of channeling it into whatever fuel I might need, but sometimes I’m like, thank God I’m anxious about stuff because otherwise I’d just sleep all day (Laughs) and just be lazy."

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