Lewis Pullman is feeling “super un-hero-like,” he says wryly as he logs onto our Zoom call the day of the Los Angeles premiere of Thunderbolts*. It’s understandable. In the prior 72 hours, the 32-year-old actor—you might recognize him from Top Gun: Maverick or Salem’s Lot—has been back and forth from London and done more interviews than he can count to support the latest big-screen addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “My body is being bounced from place to place and my mind’s just kind of catching up,” he explains. Then his smile broadens. “But it’s all fun. It’s all pretty awesome.”
The positivity is well earned. After a cinematic rough patch, Thunderbolts* is being hailed as a return to the MCU’s heyday. As Eric Francisco put it on this very site, “At a moment when the MCU is at its darkest hour, Thunderbolts*…rises to the occasion as a triumph.” And right there in the mix, alongside fan favorites like Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova and David Harbour as the Red Guardian, is Pullman. His character, Robert “Bob” Reynolds—also known as The Sentry and, on his bad days, The Void—is “the heart” of the entire film. And Pullman’s performance “is powerful enough to thaw even the iciest of critics.” Not bad for an actor who’s never stepped into a super suit before.
Today, though, Pullman is stepping into another suit. This one is by Italian luxury label Brioni, and it came into his life via his stylist, Warren Alfie Baker. If the L.A. premiere is, as Pullman puts it, “the eye of the storm,” the monochromatic look is what he’s wearing to weather it. Before all that, though, he takes the time to chat with me about joining the MCU, his extensive T-shirt collection, the most important thing he learned from his Thunderbolts* costars, and more. Read on for a few (condensed and edited) highlights from our conversation.
Pullman in Brioni, with Louboutin boots and an Omega watch.
On his outfit for the evening
If anyone ever compliments anything that I’m wearing, it’s only because I’m wearing something that Warren Baker picked out by hand. I had to have him write it out for me because I’m kind of new to the whole world, but I’ve got the full look is custom Brioni with an Omega watch and Louboutin shoes. The suit is a washed silk fabric and it’s all monochrome. And I love a good monochrome. In some ways, it sort of echoes the suits that are worn in this movie. It feels like every superhero has their own color. We didn’t want to be too on the nose with using my character’s colors, but there are some kind of bluish hues within Sentry’s costume, and this just felt like a good, simple, classic, timeless way [to nod to that].
On his personal style
I probably own 150 T-shirts and I wear maybe 20 of them. I’m a big T-shirt, jeans, and boots guy. I love cowboy boots, and I love incorporating boots into the fancier looks so it feels personal to me. But I’m trying to venture beyond them, so I just bought my first pair of sneakers recently as well as Clarks Wallabees. They’re kind of soft and slipper-y, which I’ve been liking.
“I probably own 150 T-shirts and I wear maybe 20 of them,” Pullman says.
On entering the MCU
It’s an intimidating thing to step into, because it has matured into its own thing. It’s had its awkward stages and it’s such an exciting trajectory that it’s a massive story within itself: how Marvel has come to be. I’m aware of what it means to be a fan of something—almost paralyzingly so. There are things that I love so much, and it feels like sacred ground whenever somebody new is stepping in. There was never a moment where I wasn’t overwhelmingly aware of that, and I wanted to make sure to do justice to what people loved about this character from the comic books, while also keeping in mind that when you leap from the page to the frame, you have a sense of self that you have to bring in whether you like it or not.
At first I was like, “I’m just going to do justice to everything that I love about this character and everything that I find really compelling about Bob and Sentry.” And then quickly I was like, “No, this is my job and this is why they hired me: to bring parts of myself wherever there’s room for it and for that to bridge the gaps that occur when you bring something to a completely different medium.” It was difficult, but in a really fruitful way.
“I wanted to make sure to do justice to what people loved about this character from the comic books,” Pullman says, “while also keeping in mind that when you leap from the page to the frame, you have a sense of self that you have to bring in whether you like it or not.”
On the different facets of Bob
He’s almost like a kaleidoscope or something. Depending on what angle you’re tilting him at, you get to see different fragments of his psyche. It was challenging to have all of that life and all of that debris flying around within him without giving anything away too soon. You could maybe understand him better with a second watch; maybe that you could see those subtleties and pick them out better once you know where he lands.
On the audience’s experience of Thunderbolts*
There’s a lot that I want people to be surprised by. We worked so hard to preserve the surprises, but you also want to talk about some of the themes that are in there so people are excited to see it. Because this is a movie that has a lot of emotional weight to it and Jake Schreier, the director, is so in tune with that and he was really riding a fine line between talking about these really bigger topics like mental health and entertaining people. That’s why I want to go sit in a movie theater and watch a movie. Yes, be entertained in the most classic, popcorn-y way, but also to be left thinking about it and wanting to live in that place and with those characters long after the end credits roll.
And that’s what this movie does so well. You leave and you want to keep hanging out with these people and you feel like you made a couple of new friends, and you also feel like that we’re talking about things that should be talked about and not in a clean way. It’s messy and it’s not without its faults because you’re dealing with a bunch of misfit scallawags who are trying to figure out their own version of what a healthy relationship and collaboration look like and trying to give each other therapy while they’re taking breaths in between fights.
“You’re dealing with a bunch of misfit scallawags who are trying to figure out their own version of what a healthy relationship and collaboration look like and trying to give each other therapy while they’re taking breaths in between fights,” Pullman says of the Thunderbolts* team.
On his first experience with the story
Jake just sent me a picture of the patio where we first met, and he was like, “That’s our spot, baby.” We were like two cavemen around a campfire telling some old story because I couldn’t read the script. He just told me verbatim the tale of the Thunderbolts and how Sentry fits into that. And he had some storyboards, which were our cave paintings, that he was pointing to along the way. But for the most part I went into that audition on word of mouth, which is I think so cool because I got to see how Jake tells that story from beginning to end just with his own words. I got to see his excitement and how much he found in common with each one of these characters. I think the best directors take it very personally while also keeping in mind that they are dealing with many other people’s personal attachments. So they leave room for that, but they also have a deep hunger and passion to tell the story because there’s part of themselves in it. There couldn’t have been anybody better to tell this one. It was like he needed to tell it.
“There couldn’t have been anybody better to tell this one,” Pullman says of director Jake Schreier. “It was like he needed to tell it.”
On learning from the cast
It was a fun cast to be a part of because everyone is so funny but also really damn good at their jobs. They realize that your life doesn’t pause when you start a movie and resume after you finish it. Making these movies is our lives. They’re very aware of that, so they want to have fun doing it, which is such a relief of a thing to be able to absorb.
It’s taken me some time to realize that you don’t have to suffer to make something good. Because this is such comedy met with such severe realism, you have to be a gymnast of an actor to oscillate between those two tones, and I learned so much from each one of them about how they did it. I mean, Florence is a unicorn. She’s so goofy and fun in between takes and then she’d just drop in. The muscular makeup of her face would shift, and all the residue of whatever she was just laughing at would vanish. It was like, “Okay, that’s where I want to get to. I want to get to that place that these guys are operating at.”
“It’s taken me some time to realize that you don’t have to suffer to make something good.”
On the one thing no one’s asking about
Nobody is asking about the bladder control training that it takes to put on one of these suits. Because it takes 20 minutes, half an hour to put it on or take it off. Well, me and my buddy Ryan Dempsey, who was in charge of putting me in the human condom every day and taking me out of it, we got it down to 10 minutes and we would make it fun. We’d play Creed on our little speakers and he baby-powdered me down. But I would have to not drink for three hours before I got in the suit. You really learn to be able to monitor how far you are away from peeing your pants as a grown man. The first suit, they were so kind to put a zipper in, and then Jake was like, “It’s weird for him to have a zipper. It’s just weird.” And I was like, “You’re right. I have no real argument for that.”
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