Lewis Pullman said his background with social work helped shape how he approached playing his Marvel character Sentry, as he has personal experience with the struggles that come with maintaining mental health.
“It felt very personal to depict it in an accurate and sensitive way that is also digestible to people all over the world,” Pullman, who graduated from Warren Wilson College with a degree in social work, said in an interview with GQ.
“In some ways, I always had this naive dream about blending my social work experience with film, which has been kind of hard to do, but in a lot of ways this character and this film feel like the first time I’ve been able to weld those things together because this character deals with some stuff that I’ve dealt with,” Pullman added.
For those yet to watch the film, Sentry — whose real name is Robert “Bob” Reynolds — is a former drug addict who ends up participating in an operation that seeks to create an ultimate superhero. While he survived the experiment and gained immense power, his Hulk-like abilities emit a dark void that consumes everything around him, rather than a transformation into a large, angry monster. Through the character’s own personal experiences dealing with an abusive father that triggered his drug abuse, the film highlights themes of depression and mental illness. The sinister void are Sentry’s suppressed feelings personified.
“Once [director Jake Schreier] described the character, I was like, I can’t actually imagine myself being any other Marvel character,” Pullman said. “The superhero whose weakness is his depression and trauma — I think there’s a lot to mine there.”
“Thunderbolts” is currently in theaters.
