When Highston didn’t go forward, Pullman dedicated himself to getting better at auditions, since the idea of doing them terrified him so much. “That’s scarier than any other part of the process. It’s just so many unnatural elements in that room,” he says. “I grew up a very anxious kid and not very socially apt in a lot of ways. I was like, If I can do this, I can be a ninja conversationally outside of that.”
As Pullman honed those skills, he started appearing in his friends’ movies and music videos as they too were entering the industry. “I said yes to everything,” he explains. “I wanted to just do as much as possible, no matter how embarrassing or humiliatingly clownish it was. I was like, it doesn’t matter, because I just need to be able to not treat the camera like a villain and treat it like a friend.”
Then he adds, “There’s so much blackmail material out there of me where I was just trying to figure it out.”
Pullman got his first big break with 2018’s Bad Times at the El Royale, a Tarantino-ish film from writer-director Drew Goddard, set in a hotel that straddles the California-Nevada border, and might also be purgatory. He played an outwardly meek bellboy harboring his own sinister secrets; it was the last role cast in the movie, because they couldn’t find the right young actor. Too many of them played up the damage and potential danger in the character, but Goddard was searching for something else, and immediately saw it in Pullman.
“It’s what you’re looking for in casting, which is someone who is deeply connected to the soulfulness of the character, and Lewis just accessed that,” Goddard says. ”There’s something about men, and young men in particular, where they’re afraid to be compassionate and earnest. Whereas Lewis—his beating heart just comes out on the screen immediately.”
Though El Royale underperformed at the box office, critics took note of Pullman, even as he shared scenes with Jeff Bridges, Chris Hemsworth, and Jon Hamm giving uninhibited performances. Over the course of his brief career, he’s also performed alongside consistently great workhorses including Lili Taylor, Bill Camp, Kyle Chandler, and Jason Clarke. Pullman is an eager student of the acting craft, but has realized that maybe not everyone on set is as down to talk shop as he is. “I always want to get right into asking questions and geeking out about it, but everyone’s different and everyone has different processes and sometimes don’t want to crack their bubble of imagination to be like, ‘How was Hell or High Water for you?’” he says.
That wasn’t his experience on Top Gun: Maverick, the domestic box office champion of 2022. In that movie, Pullman played another character named Bob, whose bad-ass call sign is also… Bob. In a room of cocksure alphas, Bob is an oblivious beta. The supporting cast of the Tom Cruise vehicle was stacked with hotly-tipped young actors—Glen Powell, Miles Teller, Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez—but the star at the center of the film made himself readily available to them.