Bill Pullman, Cosmopolitan, August 1995

Interview by Jamie Diamond

It's not hard to picture Pullman, a broad-shouldered man with an easy laugh, as a carpenter. His wholesomeness is so convincing, in fact, he's been repeatedly cast as the Nice Guy Who Loses the Girl. But don't bring this up with him. He's worked in movies for nine years, he's quick to point out, and only in the last two have his characters been losers in love. What matters, he says, is not the similarities of these roles but the differences.

"In Sommersby, I was this Ichabod Crane character living in pain and drinking his own bile," he says, "in Malice, a jilted college professor obsessed with retribution and vengeance. And in Sleepless in Seattle, I was a vain, well-off man who thought he'd found the girl of his dreams, only to discover that they were both living in denial."

In While You Were Sleeping, Pullman's fortunes change dramatically. As Jack Callahan, a blue-jeans-and-flannel-shirt kind of fellow who makes furniture, he still reeks of good nature -- but this time gets the girl (Sandra Bullock). His star turn has also catapulted him into a select group of actors who are completely at home with romantic comedy.

What's the key ingredient to the genre? "Pain," says Pullman. "Love has to be thwarted, of course, but you also have to instill a deep sense of yearning. And, in a script, yearning for someone usually looks like whining or self-pity. So a romantic comedy needs that undercurrent of pain. It's not just two people falling in love and being comic together."

This afternoon Pullman has driven his Dodge pickup to a modest outdoor Mexican restaurant and parked at a meter. In his gray sweater and khaki pants, he looks more like a starving graduate student than a suddenly hot actor (he's also appearing in Casper as a New Age therapist and filming Mr. Wrong, opposite Ellen DeGeneres). But the truck, though less-than-glamorous by Hollywood standards, is an improvement over the 1973 Plymouth Valiant he drove until last year. "I remember someone on the crew of Malice screaming at me, 'Don't you know you're one of the stars of this movie? You can't come in here driving that car like a farmer.'" Former barn-lover Pullman took the criticism as a compliment.

The sixth of seven children of an upstate New York physician and a nurse, Pullman hadn't set his sights on acting. Instead of following his father into medicine, he enrolled at a vocational college to learn how to restore those lovely barns. "My parents were getting older by the time I came along -- they were to tired to object to my choice of career," he jokes. In college, he met an inspirational drama teacher who changed his life: Rather than build barns, he'd stage plays inside them.

While completing his master's degree at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Pullman joined a summer theater company that toured the hinterlands of South Dakota and Montana. That led to a teaching job at the University of Montana, where, separated from his girlfriend, Tamara, he learned firsthand about thwarted love, pain, and yearning. They married eight years ago and now have three children.

After his stint in the Western outback, Pullman moved to New York City, where he won acclaim as an actor in off-broadway shows -- especially in Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class, as Kathy Bates's loser of a husband. He then turned his Plymouth Valiant toward Hollywood and began to win movie parts -- in Ruthless People, The Accidental Tourest, Singles, and Sleepless in Seattle. Sinister roles in The Last Seduction and Malice strikingly demonstrated his versatility.

In the latter, which also starred Alec Baldwin, Pullman played his first nude love scene (with Nicole Kidman). "You have feelings then, of course," he acknowledges, "but there's a line you draw mentally beyond which you don't go. A lot of people ask my wife, 'How do you feel seeing your husband doing that?' But if it had been anything other than a fictional love scene, I think she would have picked up on it."

A few moments later, Pullman notices that not only is he running late, his parking meter has expired. He runs out to the street and finds a grim-faced traffic jockey writing a ticket.

Pullman strikes up a conversation with the man. The actor's posture is nonthreatening, voice caressing -- so loose and friendly that the officer smiles, closes his book, and moves on to ticket the next car.

Being a Nice Guy has rewards.

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