I was first introduced to Lewis Pullman in Top Gun: Maverick. The entire time I kept thinking, ”That dude looks like a young Bill Pullman.” I had no idea until the closing credits that the reason he looked so much like him was because it was his son! Lewis, 32, has actually been an actor since 2013 and has two dozen credits to his name. He received an Emmy nomination for the miniseries Lessons in Chemistry with Brie Larson.

Lewis stars as the villain in the newest Marvel movie, Thunderbolts. He’ll reprise the character in next year’s Avengers: Doomsday (You know, the one where Robert Downey is also playing Dr. Doom for some reason.) In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Lewis talked about a range of things, including Thunderbolts, the work he put into his craft, what Jeff Bridges taught him, and, of course, being a nepo baby. Lewis took the opportunity to let everyone know that he’s lucky and he knows it.

The (nepo baby) elephant in the room: I think that’s what is so undeniably fortunate about nepotism … what’s the hardest to get is the opportunity to get experience and to find your comfortability within a very bizarre circumstance… And it took me so long to get comfortable in front of a camera and to forget that it’s there, and I wouldn’t have gotten that if I didn’t get all these chances to do so.

Why he became an actor: I was very naive about what my dad did growing up until high school. Then I really started getting curious about it and found a love for it. And he was always very supportive, my mom was always very supportive. I was doing theater as a kid, but then when I got out of college, I really started to think maybe I could do this actually, ‘cause I’m having so much damn fun and I don’t want to stop. And it’s been a really incredible kind of blossoming for me.

His dad gives him advice: [W]e have always been such a close-knit family, but it’s great to be able to confide in my pops about certain issues or certain questions. For a long time, I was like, I’m gonna do this on my own and was very stubborn, and I’m so glad that I got over whatever that was because now it’s such a gift to be able to share different experiences with my dad and get advice from him.

On charting his own path: I felt a lot of pressure to fill his shoes, you know. And once I realized that it was an impossible pair of shoes to fill, I kind of found a sense of relief in knowing that if there was any future for me in film that it would be by doing it my own way and trying to blaze my own trail. So that really freed me up in a lot of ways, kind of realizing that I’m very different from him in a lot of ways. I don’t have the same strengths that he has, so that was a big kind of opening up for me once I was like, OK, I can find my own voice and my own thing and gave myself permission to do that.

He’s glad his dad’s not an a-hole: I’m just so lucky that I love him so much. It would be a bummer if he was a bad actor or an asshole and I had to talk about him all the time, you know, and try and follow that (Laughs). Every set I go to, somebody has worked with my dad and they love him so much and so I’m like, it’s a hard reputation to follow, you know, flying in his wake. I’m always reminded of how incredibly generous and kind and talented he is.

His perfect day off: I definitely like to have a blend of like full hermitizing, as Jeff Bridges calls it. I’d be like, “What did you do this weekend?” He was like, “Uh, just did some more hermitizing,” [Pullman says in his best Bridges’ voice]. And I definitely have that, so sometimes that’s just sleeping, and then it would involve me taking my dog on a hike and seeing my family, and maybe reading, playing some drums. And then driving over and maybe hanging out with my nephew and sister and brother and mom and dad and brother-in-law, hanging out in the yard and throwing and using sticks for swords and that kind of thing (Laughs).

On overcoming anxiety: I think anxiety has been a big one that has followed me around my whole life, and so making it a friend and knowing that it’s actually there for a reason and that it’s actually trying to help you and kind of distinguishing when it’s right and when it’s wrong, but not shaming yourself for it. And figuring out how many different shapes it can take, and anxiety doesn’t always look like anxiety. So kind of morphing it and kind of channeling it into whatever fuel I might need, but sometimes I’m like, thank God I’m anxious about stuff because otherwise I’d just sleep all day (Laughs) and just be lazy.

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

A lot of his responses are very loquacious, shall we say, but I love his enthusiasm. He’s clearly very driven and his whole answer about always being dissatisfied has me singing “Satisfied” from Hamilton in my head now. The whole “hermitizing” thing from Jeff Bridges is funny yet relatable. That sounds like an introvert’s idea of a perfect day off. I suffer from anxiety and have never heard the advice to make it a friend, so I find that mindset to be very interesting, too.

I also appreciate that he doesn’t deny that he was fortunate to get chances other people wouldn’t have had because of nepotism, and really like that he applied the way the system helped him specifically. He didn’t say that being a nepo baby in Hollywood means you didn’t work hard or just get handed roles because of your name, just that it gave him more chances than most of his peers would have had. On that same note, what do we think about him saying he was “naive” about his dad being an actor until high school? I can buy it. Some kids just really are that oblivious, plus, Lewis and his older siblings were homeschooled, so he didn’t have classmates constantly reminding him that his dad was famous.

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