Open up X (formerly known as Twitter), search for “Lessons in Chemistry,” scroll for a bit, and a few patterns will begin to emerge. The first is that the television adaptation’s rabid fan base — it’s based on Bonnie Garmus’ 2022 novel, which was a No. 1 New York Times best-seller — is really smitten with Lewis Pullman. The internet is all but flooded with fan-cam-style tributes to the actor and his portrayal of Calvin Evans, renowned chemistry researcher and love interest to Brie Larson’s Elizabeth Zott. The actor signed on to the project, which Larson optioned before the book hit shelves, just as the novel’s popularity was kicking off, so he wasn’t yet aware what proverbially large shoes he would be filling. But he says he still felt the weight of the role. “I actually didn’t audition for this, which is scary,” he says. “If you don’t audition, you wonder, ‘Gosh, what are they imagining that I’m going to do?’ Like, ‘Holy shit, I hope your confidence in me is correct.’ ”
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Pullman is in the middle of a very fruitful period. After making his feature film debut in 2017’s The Ballad of Lefty Brown, he followed up with roles in Bad Times at the El Royale, George Clooney’s Hulu adaptation of Catch-22, and, most notably, joined Tom Cruise, Miles Teller and Glen Powell in Top Gun: Maverick. He’s calling in to this interview from Hoboken, New Jersey, where he’s on the set of a project that he’ll shoot right up until his planned Christmas family vacation in Montana, where his father, Bill Pullman, lived before pursuing an acting career.
The other thing that everyone (on the Internet, at least) is talking about is the slight continuity error in Lessons in Chemistry: Six-Thirty, Elizabeth Zott’s beloved dog, is played by a Goldendoodle. Though the show takes place in the 1950s, the breed didn’t start appear until the 1990s. The discrepancy is something that Pullman also relates back to the weight of taking on a project like this. “There’s a danger and a beauty of adapting a novel,” he says. “People fall in love with these books and everything about them becomes important [to those people].” He says that the dog was simply the best actor for the job, and the team hoped audiences would be able to see that. “He was so cute and extremely skilled, so you’re like okay, maybe people will focus more on the fact that he’s able to emote well,” he says with a laugh. “He was a bit of a genius.”
Here, Pullman talks to THR about the show’s decision to expand the character of Calvin, the inevitable comparisons to his actor father, and how he’s keeping busy off the set.
We were originally supposed to do this profile in August. How would you describe your strike experience?
I was just talking to my friend Glen Powell about this exact thing. We were like, we’re so glad to be working because I never learned to be idle very well. Having a sole, singular purpose is the easiest thing for me. But instead I did a bunch of stuff. I did a play with my friend Sean Sipos from Outer Range; we were shooting this last season in Santa Fe and we decided a crazy idea would be to put up a two-man play at the same time. We lived together and worked on it, its’ called A Steady Rain by Keith Huff. When the SAG strike hit, we decided to do it again. I also did what many actors did and started a production company and a podcast.
I didn’t know you started a podcast! This is why you need social media — to announce things like this.
Me and my friends Danny Ramirez and Greg Tarzan Davis — two other Top Gun boys — started it together. We wanted to call itKnowledge Heist but that title was taken; basically, we all have a really strong rapport but are very different guys, so the idea was to sit down together with great minds we’ve had the chance to meet over the years and steal all their golden nuggets of wisdom. It’s like Smartless, but less smart. And less funny. (Laughs)
You mentioned not being able to be idle. Do you think you learned or retained any element of being comfortable in slowness during the pandemic? Could you apply that during this latest work stoppage?
I really was like cool, we’re fucking ready for this. We’re prepared. And then when [the work stoppage] happened it felt like there was nothing in my muscle memory. I felt like I had to re-learn how to use an abundance of time. It was interesting to have to get creative, though, to find ways to be useful within the restraints we had.
How do you choose your roles?
I think it isn’t until recently that I’ve started to be able to have the privilege to be more specific about the direction I lean in with my acting roles. For so long you take what you can get. I was lucky that what I was getting was interesting, and was alongside incredible people. But I do feel I was stuck in this world of being the more nervous, meek, shy guy. I can relate to that, because I grew up like that. But I’ve also grown out of that so I wanted to break out of that and be able to explore characters or roles that scare me. Any job that has taught me the most has always been the one that I initially thought I couldn’t pull off. I’ve found that fear emulsifies into an energy that forces me to discover a different sliver of myself. A sliver that maybe I never knew was lying dormant in me.
I’m about to do a thing that I hate being done to me, which is questioning something you’ve said about yourself. But, were you actually meek?
I was very shy. I was a very socially anxious guy. I also loved people, so there was a weird contradiction. I loved my family and my community. It’s a cliché, but when I discovered acting in high school, it was very terrifying and humbling at first but then I felt this extreme weightlessness. I’d burst the ceiling of discomfort so everything else feels menial in comparison. It helped me to feel more comfortable operating in the world.
Were you kept at a distance from your dad’s career, then?
He kept it very separate so that we could have a somewhat normal upbringing. There was always an element of mystery behind his career. We were a very creative family, everyone is in the arts to some degree, but we weren’t allowed to watch TV. We could pick one or two movies every weekend, so it became a ritual where we came together to watch and would have conversations about it afterwards. Then I eventually went on a deep dive and watched all of my dad’s movies — ones I had been too young to see, or the smaller films — and we entered this phase of being able to talk to each other about his movies. It opened up this whole other part of his life that I hadn’t been privy to. And of course then when I got to college and could watch TV whenever I wanted, that just blows your brain up. That and sugary cereals — I really exhausted them in abundance once I was an independent man.
Have you seen the comparisons online between you and your dad’s work in While You Were Sleeping?
I haven’t. I love to hear that. I mean, these two characters are so vastly different. But I can appreciate how much of my dad — and my mom — I’ve got in me. We have our shared mannerisms and our own vernacular. I’m honored to be compared to him, because that movie’s one of my favorites.
What do you have most in common with Calvin?
His awkwardness was something that was easy for me to sink into. And he’s not very articulate in expressing his emotions, which I can relate to — the shutting down, or finding yourself mute when you’re experiencing a new emotion.
What were you going off of when you said yes?
I had the first two episodes. They of course ended up changing quite a bit. But I knew it was a very rich character – I really wanted to clarify what Calvin’s role was in the larger story and how the role services the journey of Brie’s character. One thing that was a deterrent initially was all the science jargon. That was one of my worst subjects in school. And I felt like I had to understand it all in order to perform it. We had these really awesome experts on set and I asked them to explain it all to me like I was a five-year-old. For Brie, I was convinced that it came easily to her and she understood every ounce of what was occurring on the show. I couldn’t even remember what ions were.
Were you involved in the conversations around tweaking the story to allow the character of Calvin to be in more episodes?
That was just a really great piece of news I received. I already felt lucky to be in even two episodes. It’s funny, I watched it all recently and to see that whole episode about Calvin was scary for me. But Lee [Eisenberg, the showrunner] was adamant that we learn about him and that it helps inform Elizabeth. The rest of the episodes I would just pop in as a physicalization of Elizabeth’s grief. There was a lot of joking around on set that I was playing a ghost all of a sudden. I’d just show up from around a corner. Like, what was I doing? Was I just out in space?
Did it feel hard to sit on the sidelines as this show was premiering?
To a certain degree, doing press can offer good closure for a project. You’re able to talk about it and release it into the world. But it’s also not Calvin’s story, it’s Elizabeth’s. So I was like, let’s just let it live and not get in the way. That was a relief in some ways.
This story first appeared in a December standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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