Lewis Pullman on His Morally Gray The Starling Girl Role

“The Starling Girl” actor Lewis Pullman grew up with a entrance row seat to what a steadfast and commendable profession in entrance of the digital camera appears like. The actor is the son of beloved “Independence Day” and “While You Were Sleeping” actor Bill Pullman. “My dad has just a plethora of good advice, but one that he’s adamant about is subverting expectations,” Lewis tells POPSUGAR when requested about the most effective performing recommendation he is acquired all through his profession. Lewis takes that knowledge to coronary heart together with his newest position in “The Starling Girl.”

In the movie, Lewis performs Owen, a morally gray, 20-something youth pastor who feels extra suffocated and misunderstood than ever upon returning house to his fundamentalist Christian group after an eye-opening journey to Puerto Rico. “He is so excited by all these new approaches to his faith and how he can further his transcendence into his belief in God,” Lewis shares about his character. But, sadly, his father — the chief of their fundamentalist sect — will not be as open-minded. “It’s met with absolute rejection, and it’s almost laughable. And so he feels he’s just lost.”

Owen finds an escape in a budding romance with Gem Starling (Eliza Scanlen), a 17-year-old woman on the church’s dance crew who, like him, feels her wings have been clipped. They genuinely see one another, and their relationship makes them each really feel nearer to God than any of their hyper-religious group’s onerous expectations and tips. And but, when their affair is uncovered, Owen’s resolve crumbles below the load of his father’s disapproval, and he betrays Gem in methods she was too naive to anticipate.

Owen goes alongside together with his father’s spin on their affair — that the a lot youthful and much much less skilled Gem “seduced” him — as she’s pressured to “confess” her sins in entrance of your entire church. Then, in a scene that performs like a intestine punch, Owen approaches her in entrance of everybody and affords her “forgiveness” for her transgressions. Despite this final betrayal and abuse of energy, the film by no means totally paints Owen as a clear-cut dangerous man, and Lewis thinks that’s a necessary side of the movie.

“I think the strength in the film comes from its portrayal of each character in a way that doesn’t villainize anybody. Because the moment you villainize any of these characters is the moment you’re depriving the film of the opportunity of having it relate to certain audience members,” he says.

Lewis struggled, however did handle to discover a method to empathize with Owen. “Whenever Owen is around his father, he kind of reverts back to a boy,” Lewis says of why his character could have buckled below stress, including, “Being surrounded by his father and being overpowered by that father-son dynamic where you feel like maybe [Owen] doubts everything that he ever thought, [where] any original thought that he might have had was wrong.”

He continues, “I just kept going back to that feeling and thinking, ‘What happens when you are not allowed to express your true feelings, and urges, and doubts?’ It just basically rots inside of you, and it comes out in ugly ways.”

Lewis is constructing his Hollywood profession, starring in hit motion pictures just like the motion blockbuster “Top Gun: Maverick” and time travel-infused romance, “Press Play.” But his difficult position in “The Starling Girl” he counts amongst his most difficult. “I read the script, and at first, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I really have the tools and the capability to really pull this character off,'” Lewis admits about his first ideas on the position.

Luckily, Lewis’s slate of performing position fashions are much more upstanding than that of his onscreen character’s father in “The Starling Girl.” Lewis says his “Bad Times at the El Royale” castmate Jeff Bridges taught him to “make the mundane spectacular,” including, “Not getting complacent and not losing the opportunity to tell a shade of that story that you could have missed.” And whereas Lewis admits his “Top Gun: Maverick” costar Tom Cruise’s “work ethic is something that is not necessarily learnable,” he took an equally essential lesson away from working with him. “He’s always keeping in mind the audience, right? And what he can do to make sure it’s the best experience possible [for them].”

Lewis’s dad Bill’s recommendation about subverting expectations undoubtedly helped him carry nuance to his portrayal of Owen as nicely. “[My father] always thinks, ‘What is the obvious way to do this [role]?’ And then, ‘What is the opposite way?’ And then, ‘How can I justify that?’ And it always ends up being remarkably interesting,” Lewis says about Bill’s means of unpacking a personality. “Sometimes I’m like, ‘I can’t figure out how to justify it.’ And he always has some really creative ways in, and that’s been really helpful for me.”

You can watch Lewis Pullman subvert expectations as Owen in “The Starling Girl,” taking part in in theaters now.