This article contains spoilers about Lessons in Chemistry.
What draws an actor to a role that has, shall we say, a short shelf life?
Bonnie Garmus’s novel Lessons in Chemistry introduced the world to Elizabeth Zott, a deeply intelligent yet socially awkward scientist who becomes a national sensation as a television chef. Her life up to that point, however, proved incredibly challenging as Zott navigates pre-Equal Rights Amendment academia, a traumatic sexual assault, and the untimely loss of her love, Dr. Calvin Evans.
When Apple TV+ decided to turn the novel into a limited series, actor Lewis Pullman, son of iconic actor Bill Pullman (Independence Day), eagerly approached the material, despite the character dying at the end of the second episode. It would prove to be a smart choice as Pullman is poised to receive his first Emmy nomination despite his limited screen time.
“The first two episodes were sort of like a romantic dramedy, but everything felt quite different than what you might expect. The characters were really three-dimensional, and the way that they met and the problems that they had showed quite a bit more depth than a lot of the romantic dramedies we might see. So, that was an exciting thing to try and do,” Pullman explained. “I was surprised that they even wanted me on board, so I was about to talk them out of it.”
Pullman also describes the opportunity to work with a trio of award-winning talent as an undeniable attraction. Oscar winner Brie Larson plays his on-screen love Zott while Jury Duty creator and The Office writer Lee Eisenberg boasted a reputation, according to Pullman, to be a “wildly smart guy.” Finally, the presence of director Sarah Adina Smith, who would go on to win a Directors Guild of America award for her direction of the second episode “Her and Him,” helped seal the deal.
In fact, Smith directed some of Pullman’s best work in the series in “Her and Him.” In the episode, Zott and Evans become closer after working late in the Christmas season. They spend a late night in their laboratory talking amidst the colorfully decorated environment. Pullman believes those scenes are filled with a romantic magic that allows the natural chemistry between Larson and Pullman to shine through. He even managed to pull in Evans’s backstory — he was orphaned as a child and felt disconnected from most people — and, though Smith’s direction, allowed Evans to relax around Larson’s Zott. Pullman’s transformation as Evans across the first two episodes of the series proved to be a successful experiment in chemistry.
But if his chemistry with Larson came easily, then the “chemistry speak” required for the role did not.
“I had to accept the truth of the fact that I was going to have to act quite a bit of this in terms of my understanding. I was trying to learn and relearn some of the basics just so that I could at least kind of fake it, but my brain does not work like this,” Pullman laughed. “We had many real chemists on set with us who were working through all the experiments with us together. So, what I did was I asked a few of them to record how they would deliver these lines so that I wasn’t hamming it up or making it too expository. It was like trying to memorize and deliver, with truth, a different language for me.”
Alas, as “Her and Him” comes to a close, Pullman’s Evans goes on one of his many jogs to his laboratory with their dog, Six Thirty. As he struggles with the dog for a brief moment, he’s hit by a city bus in a shockingly abrupt moment. It proved a stunning moment for those who haven’t read Garmus’s source novel, and Smith’s lensing of the scene amped up the shock value.
Filming the scene, however, proved an exercise in humility for Pullman.
“That sequence was one of those scenes where you feel a little bit like acting is… you’re just a clown or something. Or acting is just basically some sort of a weird embarrassment exercise. We were on this public street in Pasadena, and we shot it one way where it was with a fake dog, a stuffed animal. So, it was me with a stuffed animal on a leash trying to pretend like it was giving me a lot of resistance, which involves a serious amount of mind working in order to not move the stuffed animal and to really have some resistance in your body language. Then, I literally had to stumble back and be fake hit, hit by nothing, an invisible thing. I had to just basically fake that the leash came off and then fake that a bus hit me and then fake fall to the ground. A lot of people were watching on the sidewalks there and imagine me just in working with all these invisible things. It looked like a weird avant-garde modern dance or something.”
Over the rest of the series, Pullman is briefly seen as a memory invoked by Larson’s Zott to mentally help her through her most challenging moments. In those moments, Pullman said, he wasn’t Calvin Evans. He thought he would just approach these moments as a simple walk-through exercise. Instead, he represented a projection of how Elizabeth Zott imagined Calvin Evans would be in that particular moment.
“Those scenes and watching Brie navigate her character’s truth, despite her circumstances, and also her compassion bleeding through for their daughter was, to me, just incredible work and incredibly heartbreaking.”
Lessons in Chemistry streams in its entirety on Apple TV+.