Lewis Pullman Will Keep His Shirt On

“When was your last panic attack?” Lewis Pullman asks me. We’ve been talking about how we’re both too anxious to enjoy psychedelics — “I don’t like feeling out of control in my brain,” he says — which is not really the conversation you’d expect to be having with a newly minted Marvel star on the eve of his blockbuster hitting theaters. But during the course of a nearly two-hour, three-rounds-of-Sancerre lunch at The Odeon, Pullman — now starring in Thunderbolts* alongside Florence Pugh and Sebastian Stan — is gladly game, maybe even a little relieved, to go off script following a breakneck press tour.

“All the actors in Thunderbolts* are so darn good at [the publicity] part of things. Everybody’s biology is different… but I need time to refuel the tank,” he says, wedging a wintergreen Zyn into his upper lip. “My mom was saying, ‘You got to remember: You’re in a flesh suit. You’re still a human. You still need to rest.’” He’s hoping a boozy meal will lead to a snoozy afternoon: “I might just do one more glass, because I want to take a nap.”

Pullman doesn’t read as self-conscious. He’s generous with eye contact, easy to banter with, and immune to checking his phone. But the 32-year-old has always considered himself highly sensitive. The youngest of three siblings, Pullman says he put a lot of pressure on himself to “stay out of the way” as a kid. By 14, his mother sensed there might be something deeper happening beneath the surface. She put him into therapy, and he was diagnosed with social anxiety and OCD. “I’m such a reactive person. Even being in this loud space, I feel like I'm taking in a lot of data,” Pullman says. “I think all my senses, the valve is a little too open at all times.”

This has made figuring out what to do with his life occasionally tricky. Pullman studied social work in college and volunteered at AHOPE Day Center, a homeless service center, in Asheville, North Carolina. But he just couldn’t close the valve. “One of my main mentors, Asia, told me, ‘When you drive home find a marker on the road, like a telephone pole. Once you pass that you’re not allowed to think about work anymore,’” he says. “Creating boundaries, holding your own space, and monitoring your emotional energy is actually what is required and that was really hard for me to grapple with. There’s a lot that can bleed over.”

“I went through a phase where I stopped doing therapy because I was like, ‘What if I fully fix myself and then have nothing to draw from?’ It was so douchey.”

Was a life in the arts — disappearing into roles, summoning emotions the second a director yells “Action!” — a better match for those open-valve gifts? Yes and no. In Thunderbolts*, Pullman plays Bob Reynolds (and his superpowered personas, The Sentry and The Void) — one of the New Avengers with a history of addiction and mental health struggles. Pullman talks about the impact of the role with the intensity of someone who just played, well, The Joker.

“He has a pretty barbed past, very traumatic, with just a rough family situation, so you meet him when he’s like that and constantly having these flashbulbs of grief, of just strangulation of his past,” Pullman says. “I’m still kind of shedding it.”

He doesn’t mind going deep, though. “I just went through a phase where I stopped doing therapy because I was like, ‘Well, what if I fully fix myself and then I have nothing to draw from?’ It was so douchey,” he says. “To think that by ignoring something, you’re going to be able to [tap into it]? If anything, by looking at it closer, you’re able to understand it more and control it better.”

Pullman grew up in a family of creatives: His father is actor Bill Pullman; his mother, Tamara Hurwitz, is a modern dancer; and his siblings are both in the arts. They lived in Los Angeles but spent summers on the family’s ranch in Montana herding cattle. Today, Pullman’s low-key combo of button-down shirt and jeans gives more Yellowstone than 90210. Drumming was his gateway into performing — he’s played in the band Atta Boy since high school — and he starred in a few short films during college. But acting professionally always intimidated him, so much so that Pullman would sometimes take his glasses off during auditions. (You don’t have to worry if the casting director looks happy if you simply can’t see them.) “There’s a lot of stimuli that has nothing to do with what’s happening, so it was a way of softening the edges where I was more in control,” he says.

“One of the great benefits of growing up with my dad is he always really prioritized and valued his privacy.”

Early roles in projects like Battle of the Sexes, Bad Times at the El Royale, and Catch-22 assured him he was on the right path. By the time 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick came around, he was hooked. In the long-awaited sequel, Tom Cruise reprised his role as alpha pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, who returns to his old training school to both teach and make betas out of a new crop of hot-shot pilots played by Miles Teller, Glen Powell, and Jay Ellis. Pullman’s bespectacled character, however, is already plenty submissive: He gets partnered with the only female pilot and keeps his shirt on during the film’s beachside biceps bonanza. Pullman jokes that between Maverick and Thunderbolts*, he’s carved out a niche playing the “shirt-on characters” in blockbusters otherwise populated by sun’s-out-guns-out types. “I relate to that cripplingly self-conscious, keeping-the-shirt-on-at-the-pool-party kid,” he says.

He did, however, bulk for Thunderbolts* just in case.“I was ready for a scene where this whole SWAT team was supposed to shoot this shirt off of [my character’s] body. I got fitter than I’d ever been in my life and we didn’t even shoot it!” he says, laughing.

Top Gun was formative in other ways. Between takes, Pullman was happy to sit on the sidelines and soak in the wisdom of those higher up on the call sheet. “Tom was putting himself in our shoes every day and consciously giving us the experience of working with a veteran like him. But then there was also another tier of experience where I got to learn from Jay Ellis and Glen Powell,” he says. (When I blurt out that Jay Ellis is also extremely hot, Pullman meets my gaze: “Absolutely, smoldering hot.”)

For Pullman, Powell’s path from entry-level script reader to actor-screenwriter was particularly inspiring. “From Glen, I learned about the long game and planting seeds for ideas that might not happen in two or three years,” he says. “But if you keep your nose to the grindstone, they will happen, and they’ll be that much more fully fleshed out because you’ve been existing with them for that long.”

“I got rid of [my Instagram] for stupid actor reasons. I was like, ‘I don’t think my character would have Instagram.’”

Pullman’s career has already been extremely fruitful. He earned an Emmy nomination for his work in 2023’s Lessons in Chemistry opposite Brie Larson, and he’ll star in the next project from the husband-and-wife team behind last year’s Oscar-winning The Brutalist. Yet he’s still adjusting to the pressures that come with superhero fame. Like, Reddit-threads-about-whether-he’s-dating-Kaia-Gerber pressures. How does he deal with that?

“That’s a fair question. I think one of the great benefits of growing up with my dad is he always really prioritized and valued his privacy,” Pullman says. “You know the casualties of the landscape that you’re signing up for, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be proactive in creating an armor for the things that you love most.”

Staying off the internet helps. Pullman has an iPhone mini, but the only form of social media he uses is Letterboxd. (“I got rid of [my Instagram] for stupid actor reasons,” he says, cringing at himself. “I was like, ‘I don’t think my character would have Instagram.’”) Everything else is just stimuli to tune out.

After lunch, I walk Pullman back to his hotel, and he immediately appears lighter while taking in the relative calm of Tribeca in the late afternoon. With the sun shining down on us and that well-earned nap on the horizon, he seems properly recharged. “I really want to bring my best self,” he says of taking his career to Avengers-level heights. “I just have to get used to: Sometimes wherever I am is what they’re going to get — and that’s as good as I can do.”