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Bill Pullman

Bill Pullman has built a career around an unusually flexible screen presence. He can play sincerity without becoming bland, authority without losing vulnerability, and comedy with just enough restraint to let the surrounding absurdity do its work. Born in Hornell, New York, on December 17, 1953, Pullman studied theater at SUNY Oneonta before earning an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1980. He later taught theater at SUNY Delhi and served as an adjunct professor at Montana State University, where his students encouraged him to pursue film roles. After working primarily with theater companies in New York and Los Angeles during the 1980s, Pullman found his first prominent film role in Ruthless People. His range quickly became clear. He played the square-jawed but cheerfully ridiculous Lone Starr in Spaceballs, appeared in the unsettling supernatural horror of The Serpent and the Rainbow, and took roles in A League of Their Own, Malice, Casper and While You Were Sleeping. In 1996, he played the President of the United States in Independence Day, bringing calm conviction to one of the decade’s defining science-fiction blockbusters. The following year, David Lynch’s Lost Highway gave him a far darker and more fractured showcase. He also voiced Korso in the animated film Titan A.E. Pullman has continued moving between film, television and theater rather than settling into a single lane. On television, he starred as Dr. Richard Massey in Revelations, played Oswald Danes in Torchwood: Miracle Day and returned to presidential comedy in 1600 Penn. His four-season role as detective Harry Ambrose in The Sinner gave him an extended mystery-drama showcase. The stage has remained central to his work. Pullman received Drama Desk Award nominations for performances in Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? and Peter and Jerry, and appeared on Broadway in David Mamet’s Oleanna. He is also a playwright: Expedition 6 opened at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre in 2007. Across those different forms, Pullman’s career has been defined less by one fixed persona than by his willingness to keep shifting the ground beneath it.