This interview contains spoilers for “Thunderbolts*.”
Lewis Pullman still isn’t sure if he’s playing a hero or a villain in the latest Marvel movie, “Thunderbolts*.”
“He’s very malleable and easily influenced because he hasn’t had a real, strong, reliable source of love in his life,” the actor said of his character, a dark Superman-like figure known as the Sentry/the Void — although his civilian name, Bob, is how you might remember him best.
Think what would happen if Superman were super-depressed. Oh, also, he appears capable of vaporizing people with a flick of his hand.
“There’s a contrast between being this all-powerful being and then having your greatest weakness and your main Achilles’ heel be your own self,” Pullman said in video call this week from his apartment in Los Angeles.
He had just returned to the city, where he was born and raised, after a Vancouver, B.C., shoot for the Netflix movie “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” based on Shelby Van Pelt’s enormously popular novel. That was followed by a whirlwind press tour that had taken him from London to New York to Los Angeles to Miami and back to Los Angeles, just in time for his brother’s wedding. He looked like he’d rolled in from the beach in a white T-shirt, denim button-up and perfectly windswept hair, and books by authors like the novelist Harry Crews and the playwright Sam Shepard were stacked behind him, with boxes resting atop tables.
“I haven’t really had the time to unpack,” he said, apologizing for the mess.
Pullman — the son of, yes, Bill Pullman — is the breakout star of the latest Marvel film, which has attracted praise for its candid depiction of mental health.
“What I love about this film is that it is so adamantly trying to rid our society” of the stigma around mental health, Pullman said. Like his character, he has an introspective bent, turning over every question in his mind before answering.
While Pullman had never read the Marvel Comics featuring the Sentry — also known as Robert Reynolds, shortened to Bob in “Thunderbolts*” — he was drawn to the profound sadness and isolation of the character, whose Hyde-like alter ego is the Void, the darkness that lives inside Bob.
Struck by bouts of melancholy, he forges an unlikely friendship with Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, who was trained as a child to be a Black Widow assassin.
“She sees something of herself in him,” Pullman said. “She sees that they are both at the end of their lines.”
The role is a breakout turn for Pullman, who earned an Emmy nomination last year for his portrayal of a brilliant scientist in the Apple TV+ series “Lessons in Chemistry.” Before that, he played a pilot — also named Bob — in the 2022 hit “Top Gun: Maverick,” opposite Tom Cruise.
“I should probably take a breather from playing Bobs,” he said with a laugh.
In the video call, he shared what drew him to the character and his own experiences with anxiety, depression and therapy. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
How did you first get involved in “Thunderbolts*”?
I got phone call that was very vague and cryptic, and I was like, “I should meet with Jake [Schreier, the director] and see what this is all about.” He couldn’t give me the script, so he told me the story old-fashioned style, word by word. It was great to have that experience. You don’t get it very often.
I had only three days to prepare for the screen test and audition, which wasn’t as much time as I’d like. So I tried to go as broad as possible, and then shrink it down and go as specific as possible in finding and discovering where it is that I, as Lewis, can relate to this character.
Where did you pull from?
What was so exciting and terrifying was how much I related to this character. In terms of the mental health parts of it, the anxiety and the depression, I have a good healthy dose of O.C.D., and just self-doubt and that negative self-talk that can paralyze you. I’m lucky to have come from a great family that was very proactive and resourceful about helping me figure it all out. And so to try to inhabit somebody who didn’t have that — I was close enough to those alleyways to be able to see what it would have looked like had I not had those.
Have you had candid conversations with people in your own life about mental health?
I was a social work major in college in North Carolina, and so I have had many conversations about these topics. Coming into this project, it was obvious that it was a major theme. But it was never our goal to make this a P.S.A. This is still an incredibly fun, large-scale blockbuster film. But by shining a flashlight on it, it becomes more real. In many ways, my anxiety is something I’m grateful for. It’s there as a protective mechanism. You don’t just make a movie about it, and then the conversation’s over. I’ll be talking about it until I circle the drain. And that’s something I’ve come to be OK with and embrace.
Do you also have personal experience with depression?
That’s something that’s less of a consistent force in my life. It comes in waves. But it’s something that’s deep in my marrow because, when you feel that, it’s very hard to forget. I was able to tap into that in a way that was safe, with therapy, and then friends and support.
I go about therapy in the same way that I go about acting — I assume that I never know anything, that there’s always something to learn. I did a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy in high school, and now I’m in talk therapy. I’ve realized that the times when you should stick with therapy the most is when you think you’re doing the best without it. That’s a mind game that I’ve fallen for a couple of times.
Why do you think the character has resonated with people?
That oscillation that he has between feeling this worthlessness, met with this true belief in yourself, is very resonant. That’s something important about Bob: He wants to be of use, but he’s been told his whole life that when he tries to get involved, he always makes things worse. A lot of us have been told that, in one way or another. And so to see this very real person amongst these surreal and extraordinary circumstances is what makes it so resonant.
Why do Bob and Yelena have such a strong connection?
She is one of the first people who really sees him. They have this commonality of desperateness for connection and for meaning. That was something that I related to with Florence. She was so generous and compassionate toward me coming into this world. She saw that I felt like I didn’t belong and didn’t feel like I was going to be able to ever rid myself of this impostor syndrome. And she took it upon herself to be a very supportive, not just castmate, but friend. And that’s hopefully what you see on camera.
What was shooting that climactic group hug like?
There were so many moments like that where Jake was like, “If we can sell this, it’ll work. If we can’t, it’s going to fall apart.” And that was this high-wire act that we felt the whole shoot. That was a hard couple of days. Luckily, Jake really made sure to protect that time in the schedule. And it was toward the end. So being able to have all that lived-in emotional memory, it was able to all just culminate into that moment.
What has it been like to see fans embrace the character?
I’d put so much weight and pressure on myself, because I wish I could have watched a character like this in high school. And so I really did not want to mess it up for little me. It just means a lot that people are going to see it, that they know that it’s not just a fun action movie, that there are also hard topics.
What do you hope people take away from the film?
I hope that people watch this who need to see it, that they find something they didn’t know that they needed. Two hours in a movie theater seems like a small amount of time, but it really can shift the course of your life.
What would you say to people who feel like Bob?
It’s OK to not smile, it’s OK to cry, it’s OK to let all those feelings out, and to not bottle them up. You’ll find that, more often than not, there will be somebody there to catch you, if you’re vulnerable enough to let them.
Sarah Bahr writes about culture and style for The Times.
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