‘Thunderbolts*’ Star Lewis Pullman Breaks His Silence on Playing Sentry

In Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts*, Lewis Pullman essentially plays three roles in one. The 32-year-old actor stars as Robert Reynolds, aka Bob, a mild-mannered mystery man who crosses paths with Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) and her oddball team of antiheroes.

In time, the seemingly powerless Bob reveals his secret: As a troubled young man, he volunteered for a top-secret Super-Soldier experiment, orchestrated by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Those experiments left him with godlike powers, and Valentina tried to reinvent him as the benevolent Sentry, a golden guardian intended to serve as a protector. But eventually, Bob’s darker side manifests itself as the Void, a dark and deadly alter ego that threatens his friends and the world at large.

Sitting down with Marvel.com ahead of the film’s premiere, Pullman said he could finally breathe a sigh of relief after months of keeping Bob’s true identity secret. He still remembers with awe the first time he saw himself in Sentry’s golden super suit, calling the moment “bizarre.”

“It felt like it was Memento or something,” Pullman says with a laugh. “I woke up like, ‘Where am I? What am I doing?’ But after I first put on [the suit], I was like, ‘Can I just get five minutes to walk around in this thing and feel like it’s mine?’ It took a minute. You never really imagine yourself in one of those suits. You always see somebody else in them, and it always seems far away from reality.”

Pullman says he was immediately drawn to the idea of playing such an emotionally complex figure, and he and Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier spent their weekends going through the script line by line, figuring out how Bob’s different personas might manifest throughout the film.

“It was more of a physical journey than I thought it [would be] going into it,” Pullman admits. “I really went into the psychology of [the character] at first. Then, I realized it was helpful to be able to use that physicality to indicate who’s at the wheel at what point. That was a really fun thing to do and a challenging thing to track.”

“I’m so grateful for Lewis,” Schreier adds. “That’s such a difficult job, especially shooting out of order.”

Although Bob, Sentry, and the Void manifest themselves in wildly different ways, Pullman notes that he never wanted them to feel like three separate characters.

 “We wanted to make sure it wasn’t so compartmentalized, that it was always clear that it was one person,” the actor explains. “It was never this code-switching, or this kind of lily pad–hopping to a completely different person. They are all qualities and parts of one person.”

Thunderbolts* is Bob’s official induction into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but the character has a long history in Marvel Comics. Reynolds made his debut in SENTRY (2000) #1 by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee, where he’s introduced as an amnesiac hero with fantastic abilities. Eventually, it’s revealed that he erased himself from the world’s memories in an effort to thwart the Void.

Both Pullman and Schreier used those original comics as inspiration to help shape Bob’s mental journey on screen.

“It’s interesting reading that run,” Schreier says. “When we talked to Paul Jenkins, he would talk about it as a parable for mental health and this idea of an equal amount of good and evil. But when I read Sentry in those comics, there is this level of hubris that he has, and it feels like people around him are getting a little concerned about it. I thought it was so resonant.”

Schreier also knew he couldn’t introduce Sentry the exact same way on-screen, especially because Marvel Studios had just debuted a different film about a hero who had been erased from the world’s memories, directed by Schreier’s one-time college roommate Jon Watts. “Obviously, we couldn’t tell that same story because of Spider-Man: No Way Home,” Schreier says with a laugh. “Thanks, Jon.” 

But the director was particularly inspired by the way Jenkins and Lee told Sentry’s story through old, vintage-inspired comics, and he wanted to add a similarly meta moment to the film. So, Schreier incorporated some playful details into the scene where Valentina presents Bob with concept art of what his golden Sentry costume could look like. The art on screen is the actual concept art created for the film by visual development supervisor Andy Park and Marvel Studios’ visual development team.

“So much of the meta of the movie is trying to create a Super Hero,” Schreier adds. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s what [Marvel] does.’ So, in that scene where Bob is learning to use his powers and they’re building a suit behind him, all of that stuff comes from our actual costume department. And there’s a 3D printer from [property master] Russell Bobbitt. We’re doing the same thing that Val is doing in the movie, so that was our little nod to the meta idea of how we represent Super Heroes.”

Once Pullman suited up, the transformation was complete. His costars remember shooting the pivotal fight scene in Val’s penthouse, where the team sees Bob in his full Sentry costume for the first time. 

“He really, really transformed into Sentry,” Florence Pugh remembers. “He really spent a lot of time in stunts. Doing wire work is really hard because [you have to] gracefully land. You’re having to keep your body in check, and making sure that it looks really effortless, graceful, and cool is hard work. He did a fantastic job of that.”

“It’s the first time we see Sentry figure out the powers that he has,” adds David Harbour. “He’s not even aware of how extraordinary he is. It’s a great performance from Lewis, watching him discover that he’s a god.”

The result is a morally complex hero and an unprecedented villain all wrapped into one — and a dream role for Pullman.

“It was a lot of fun as an actor,” he says with a smile. “That’s as good as it gets.” 

Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts* is in theaters now.