How Lewis Pullman Came Back to Earth

“I’ve done something probably 100 times that you probably haven’t noticed,” he says, explaining how he’s been looking to the right of a pillar in his line of sight, swallowing and then shifting his vision to the left. (He’s right; I hadn’t noticed.) It’s a weird thing to bond over, but Pullman invites my vulnerability with his own.

On Top Gun, he says, his colleagues were just as petrified as he was—but no one wanted to admit it. “I was the first one to be like, ‘Can anyone else not fucking sleep at night?’ And eventually everyone exhaled and was like ‘Yes, totally,’” he says.

His transparency about his anxiety helped him on Ann Lee, too, allowing him to connect with Seyfried, who has been open about suffering from panic attacks.

“It’s just nice to relate over having these fucking barriers that we’re constantly having to climb over,” says Seyfried. “He’s so honest about his struggles and is clearly willing to do the work to face that stuff, and so am I. And I respect that.”

As a boy, Pullman wasn’t interested in becoming an actor. He liked to drum and paint. When he was nine, he visited his dad on the set of 2002’s Igby Goes Down, but inadvertently arrived when his father was shooting a scene that required him to shatter a glass wall and sob in a pool of blood. “After that, Mom was like, ‘Yeah, we’re not doing this,’” he says.

At 18, Pullman enrolled at Warren Wilson College, a small liberal arts school in North Carolina. During his time there, he volunteered at a local homeless shelter and worked on a tractor with the school’s landscaping crew.

It was the kind of manual labor he’d grown up doing with his siblings—an elder brother and sister—on the family’s ranch in Montana. If the kids had anything longer than a two-day break from school, the Pullmans would travel from Los Angeles to their home near Whitehall, where the population hovers just over 1,000. Together, they’d move irrigation pipes, put in fence lines and help out on cattle drives.