Lewis Pullman needs to pay more attention to his emails.
The star of Marvel's "Thunderbolts*" admits it was his fault he missed the big livestream reveal of the "Avengers: Doomsday" cast in March that found him joining Anthony Mackie and Chris Hemsworth in the A-list squad. "The signs were there," he says: Pullman remembered filming a short cameo for the "Thunderbolts*" post-credits scene that sets up "Doomsday," but wasn't totally clear about the whole thing.
After a day of shooting in Vancouver, "I got back to my phone and I had all these texts. It was such a massive amount of possibilities that lie within that piece of information," Pullman, 32, says. Then again, he had a hard time believing he was joining the MCU in the first place. "It does feel like a little bit of this untouchable world. I just kept waiting for somebody to announce that they had made some grand error. But I made it this far."
Pullman's superhero, the Sentry (aka Robert Reynolds), is arguably the most powerful Avenger now. He does have a dark side to those abilities, though, which is explored alongside his character's new teammates Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan).
The son of longtime Hollywood star Bill Pullman is no stranger to big-time franchises: He played Bob - the same name as his Marvel dude - opposite Tom Cruise in "Top Gun: Maverick," part of a growing filmography that also includes "Salem's Lot" and the drama series "Lessons in Chemistry" (which garnered Pullman an Emmy nomination).
Here's what fans need to know about Marvel's newest rookie:
The movie reveals that Bob is a troubled meth addict who signed up to be experimented on by CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and become a super soldier. Thought to be dead, he winds up teaming with the Thunderbolts but is later turned into the Sentry, with a cape and supersuit to match his Superman-like powers. Another aspect of Bob is revealed as The Void, a dark and colorless figure that's a manifestation of his inner trauma.
"Everyone has these sort of shadow selves that sometimes, if you don't have the language to harness or control or know when it's OK to exist with them, can bleed out in dangerous ways," Pullman says. "So it's obviously quite messy.
"The Void is in many ways a mirror that we often hide from. And then to be forced to look at it is really informative if you can sit through it."
Playing the character meant having "sort of like three jobs," he adds, and Pullman felt self-doubt going into "Thunderbolts." Thankfully, he had Pugh around as a Marvel mentor. "She saw in me, maybe a little bit of fear, probably. She didn't make a big deal out of it, and she just really subtly would give me a little piece of advice that was actually massive for me."
Pullman was raised in a "very creative" family - in addition to his "Independence Day" dad, mom Tamara Hurwitz is a modern dancer and choreographer, sister Maesa is a singer and songwriter, and brother Jack designs masks and puppets - and his parents instilled in him "the idea that you don't have to choose one thing," he says. At different times in his life, Pullman wanted to be a drummer, an artist, a social worker and a rancher.
Acting "allows you to continue learning things that you would never really choose to do," Pullman says. "I've become incredibly mediocre at so many different things from having a month or two of training, whether it be roping or rowing or paddle boarding, or surfing. It pushes you to explore certain cavernous areas of yourself that normally you would neglect."
Pullman does return to his other loves, too: After recently wrapping a movie, he came home for the first time in two months and immediately sat at his drum set for three hours. "It's an amazing way to keep an even air flow throughout your creative avenues, by continually shaking up the Etch A Sketch," he says.
Next up for Pullman is the historical drama musical "Ann Lee," starring Amanda Seyfried, and he just finished production on Netflix's "Remarkably Bright Creatures," an adaptation of the Shelby Van Pelt novel featuring Sally Field and a giant octopus. Pullman doesn't have a start date yet for "Doomsday," which is filming in London, "but any minute now," he says.
The night he was announced for the new "Avengers," "I couldn't fall asleep just imagining all the different avenues and possibilities that Bob could kind of go down," Pullman says. The cast is "an embarrassment of riches," and he's hoping to at least do one scene with Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom: "Iron Man" is "really how I fell in love with Marvel, so that would be a wild full circle moment for me."