One Nightstand With Lewis Pullman

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

Not many book clubs start with a book theft, but Lewis Pullman managed to find one during high school. “My best friend, Kyle McNeil, who's a great musician, found this bookstore called Equator Books,” the 33-year-old actor says of the now-closed Venice, Los Angeles, shop which was run by poet Michael Deyermond in the 2000s. “The legend goes that Kyle stole a book, and Michael caught him and was like, ‘Listen, you can pay that off by working here.’” The teenager and the book store owner “ended up creating this beautiful friendship,” with Pullman rounding out the trio. “We had a book club called ‘Reading for Winners,’ and Michael basically was giving us all these books that they weren't teaching us in school that he was like, ‘I think boys at this age, you’re going to love this.’”

Together they read authors like Harry Crews, Denis Johnson, John Yount, and Charles Bukowski, some of whom Pullman still reads today. (Johnson’s Train Dreams, which was adapted into a Netflix movie last year starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones, made the longlist of Pullman’s favorite books for One Nightstand but didn’t make the final cut.) “Once I kind of let go of the homework side of reading and then locked in, I was like, this is an imagination playground,” says Pullman, who’s in New York to promote his new Netflix movie, Remarkably Bright Creatures, adapted from a novel by Shelby Van Pelt.

Pullman plays Cameron, a musician in an unsigned band called Moth Sausage and in search of his biological father. When his van, which he also lives in, breaks down, he finds himself stuck in a small town in the Pacific Northwest, where he takes on a job as a janitor and is apprenticed by Tova (Sally Field), a grieving mother and widow.

"She has that perfect balance of taking it so deathly seriously while also being so childlike in her exploration — it makes for a lot of surprises,” he says of working with the 79-year-old two-time Academy Award-winning actress. “My anxiety about a project [comes out] through preparation... and she kind of would, not throw it all out, but let those [plans] live and coexist within her spontaneity. At first, I was terrified... and then once I realized my sole job was to basically show up prepared and then basically listen and react — once I found that, it was such a freeing experience."

In Remarkably Bright Creatures, Tova and Cameron end up connecting over a Giant Pacific octopus called Marcellus. While the film pulls off a deft twist about family and belonging, it is in many ways about the power of animals to heal us — something Pullman, who helps out on his family ranch in Wyoming and has a dog named Bodie, relates to.

"I so often will be caught in a spiral in my head and kind of almost enter this state of paralysis,” he says, noting that Bodie will often pull him out. “I have a video of him in my car where we were driving, and he's like putting his paw on me in this kind of metronome, like a reminder of the seconds that are happening.” He continues: “He needs like one of five things at any given point and it's the simplicity of that. And then also his unconditional love is just like a total reminder of what's important.”

Keep reading to discover four of Pullman’s favorite books.

Pullman’s first pick is The Solace of Open Spaces, a collection of Gretel Ehrlich’s essays detailing her move to Wyoming from Santa Barbara while grieving her partner. The book was a gift from creator and showrunner Brian Watkins on the set of the Amazon Prime neo-western series Outer Range, in which Pullman starred opposite Josh Brolin. “I feel like sometimes nature poetry can feel a little repetitive or dull, and that's my own problem because obviously there's a lot of great nature poetry out there,” he says. “But this, to me, really made you feel like you were in all the excitement and also the quiet.”

Recently, Pullman felt the weight of the book while helping brand cattle on his aunt’s Montana ranch. “I was putting this vaccine into their nostrils, which looks like a liquid blue Jolly Rancher. For the act itself, you have to try and make it as brief as possible and use as much empathy as possible, but they're branding at the same time and so that you smell the burning hide,” he says. “I'm helping them and elongating their life. But there is a coexistence of life and death in a place like Montana or Wyoming and in conditions like what Gretel was experiencing, and it’s very well captured.”

His second choice is Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx, a 1999 collection of short stories including the enduring Brokeback Mountain. “She flirts with magical realism in this way that I love. I love that genre. I love it in film. I love it in books,” he says. “These stories all are related, but it almost felt like they were written at different times of her life, and they feel very much individual and stand alone so well. I think she has one of my favorite titles of a story ever: The People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water. It's just such a good name.”

His third selection is Motel Chronicles by Sam Shepard, a collection of the Pulitzer-winning playwright and actor’s poems and memoirs about his life on the road. “He's a traveler in a way that I really relate to, going from hotel to hotel or motel to motel and having these in-between purgatory-esque towns be your temporary home and what that feels like.”

Pullman also resonates with Shepherd’s sense of displacement. “When you go and shoot projects, you create this little small village and it’s such an isolated experience that only you guys share,” he says. “Then you go home and everyone has been experiencing their lives and you're trying to catch up, and then you feel a little lonely because you've missed so much. Then you try to connect with your friends who were on the shoot and try to feel that camaraderie again, but they're all off in their own hometowns, busy revitalizing their lives. It’s a continual tilling of the land that doesn't ever stay settled for too long.”

His final selection is Classic Crews, a series of memoirs and essays by Southern Gothic novelist Harry Crews — a favorite of the “Reading for Winners” book club. Crews, a self-described outsider, writes about the intricacies of poverty in the rural south. “He has a beautiful celebration of the person who's maybe considered a freak by society. He has a great humanization and intrigue into the cobwebs of society,” he says.

The stories range from serious to bizarre, including Car which tells the tale of a man who eats a Ford Maverick pickup truck bumper to bumper. “There's a true story about a guy who ate an entire airplane, nut by nut, bolt by bolt, and I wonder if he was inspired by that at all,” he says.

Watch the full episode below: