Bill Pullman, Premiere, August 1996

Interview by Joe Rhodes Whomping aliens in the smash hit "Independence Day" earns this hard-working actor top-gun status Bill Pullman is weirder that you think. Not in a devil-worshipping, thinks-John-Tesh-is-a-genius way, just in a manner slightly more peculiar that some of his middle-of-the-road movie roles might suggest. For example, in his Big Town production-company office he keeps a shoebox filled with Japanese hardware -- clamps and hooks and strangely shaped nails -- souvenirs from a trip to Tokyo last year.

"I love a good hardware store," Pullman says, opening the box like a kid showing off his prized collection of marbles or baseball cards, explaining the function of every clasp, marveling at the clever simplicity of the designs. "Look at this hook -- this is so Japanese," he says. "It folds up, like the hook is an imposition on the space. I love that. It's brilliant."

Prominently displayed on a shelf is something that looks like a samurai sword. "It's a pruning saw," Pullman says with awe. "They had a whole section of pruning saws."

He finds another box, this one filled with pictures of cars, Chrysler Newports and Plymouth station wagons of the 1960s, clipped out of old magazines. Until two years ago, when he bought a Dodge Ram pickup truck -- the first new vehicle he'd ever purchased -- Pullman drove a 1973 Plymouth Valiant with no air conditioning. He misses it terribly.

"It was originally owned by a traveling salesman who worked the desert around Barstow [Calif.]," he says, "and there were two places where the paint job was failing: on the top of the door and below the driver's side window. It was from the sweat from his elbow and the sweat from his hands. People would always say to me, " 'Why don't you get rid of that car?' But I liked it. I loved driving something that was evocative."

If you let him, Pullman will also talk to you about barns (he built one in his backyard) or trees (he's a horticulture fanatic whose Hollywood Hills property is bursting with exotic fruit trees: cherimoyas, jujubes and other unpronounceable varieties) or the Montana ranch he co-owns with his brother and the weeks they spend there, driving cattle and baling hay (his idea of a good time). He can get just as excited talking about how much he loves driving down Hollywood Boulevard because, in spite of the junkies and the runaways and the trash in the gutter, there is broken glass mixed in the pavement there, "and when you drive down the street, it glistens a little."

"Bill," says actress Holly Hunter, one of his closest friends, "brings bouyancy to all his passions."

At the moment, Pullman -- the sensitive fighter-pilot president of the United States (or what's left of it) in Independence Day, Meg Ryan's sneezy fiance in Sleepless in Seattle, the man of Sandra Bullock's dreams in While You Were Sleeping, the ghost-therapist dad in Casper -- doesn't look much like a movie star. He's rummaging through boxes with two days of stubble on his chin, his sandy hair unbrushed, his wrinkled shirttail hanging out of his jeans, and talking about beat-up cars and gardening tools from distant lands.

But don't be fooled, because a movie star is exactly what Bill Pullman, at 42 years old, has become. After a decade of film roles in which he always seemed to be "the other guy" -- from Malice to Sommersby to The Last Seduction -- Pullman finally ahs emerged as a leading man, the one who gets the girl, the hero who saves the day.

"There's a real Harrison Ford/Michael Douglas quality to him," says Independence Day's writer and producer, Dean Devlin, who is so taken with Pullman's leading-man aura that he and Independence Day's director, Roland Emmerich (they also created Stargate, have already signed Pullman to star in another big-budget action thriller, tentatively called Supertanker.

Pullman's ascent to big-ticket Hollywood player comes complete with applause from important admirers. "The stereotype in Hollywood is that [to succeed] you have to be some kind of vicious, awful, relentless individual that will stab anybody in the back and climb over their corpses to get to the top, "says Last Seduction's director, John Dahl. "And there are people like that. But Bill's not one of them. He's not coming from a position of vanity. He's committed to the work, and odd as this sounds, that's kind of rare."

When Pullman came to Los Angeles in 1985, becoming a movie star was not what he had in mind. He was a 31-year-old New York stage actor who'd made his mark in Sam Shepherd's off-Broadway play Curse of the Starving Class. He'd gone to California to perform at the Los Angeles Theater Center, expecting to return to New York as soon as the three-month run was finished. But he figured that as long as he was in L.A., he might as well go on a few auditions. "I really saw movies as a lark," he says of his motives. "I was just looking for a little cash."

The first film part he got was in the 1986 hit Ruthless People, playing a dumb guy before dumb guys were hot. The second was in Mel Brook's hilarious Spaceballs. For an actor who'd spent most of his time onstage doing what he calls "gut-wrenching dramas and metaphysical tragedy," this hardly seemed like serious business. But he stayed in L.A., taking film roles between plays, turning his quirky and often unglamorous parts into tiny gems that directors and other actors noticed and praised. Still, it was not the stuff of which stars are quickly made.

"Bill can play the heavy, and he can play the hero," says Robert Loggia, who co-stars with Pullman in Independence Day and an upcoming HBO movie called Mistrial. "He's able to change his persona, and that's probably why it's taken him so long to be recognized."

"It's not going to be a straight shot with me," says Pullman, who will prove it when he is seen later this year with Patricia Arquette in David Lynch's predictably twisted Lost Highway (he plays a man "who may have killed his wife"). "I wish I had a set of teeth like Tom Cruise's," he adds. "And I wish my interest ran consistently to one vein of thing that I could tap over and over, just go back to that well and draw that water again. But I'm drawn to a lot of different things."

When Pullman left his hometown of Hornell, N.Y. (a rough-and-tumble railroad town of 9,500, the "big town" for which his production company is named), it was to enter the building-construction program at SUNY College of Technology, at Delhi, N.Y., which is primarily a place to learn plumbing or carpentry or appliance repair. "There was a group of guy, refrigeration students, going to the drama club tryout," Pullman remembers, "and I just went along with them."

"I think he was skeptical of theater," says Bill Campbell, who was Pullman's acting instructor 25 years ago at Delhi and still teaches there. "He was a guy guy, and acting was what the longhaired, artsy-fartsy guys did. But even though Bill was just 17, when he read, you listened. He had that look-at-me personality."

Maybe it was because he'd been trying to get noticed most of his life. Pullman was the sixth of seven children, the youngest of five sons. His father, who died three years ago, was a doctor and the town coroner. ("I loved my father's stride," says Pullman, who often accompanied his father on hospital rounds and watched him deal with patients in the last moments of their life. "He had a very purposeful walk.") Most of his older brothers had followed in their father's footsteps, studying medicine at prestigious Eastern universities. Bill was determined to find a path of his own.

It was Campbell who convinced Pullman that his destiny lay in performing on the boards, not hammering them together, who talked him into obtaining a master's degree (from the University of Massachusetts) and becoming a theater professor himself. Pullman taught for a year at Delhi and then spent two years at Montana State (where one of his students was his future director John Dahl) before moving to New York and pursuing an acting career of his own. He was, by then, already 28 years old.

He found, to his surprise, that he loved New York's East Village, where he lived with his girlfriend Tamara, a dancer he'd met in graduate school, whom he would finally marry in 1987. The small-town doctor's son came alive in New York, exhilarated by the romantic struggle of it all: the unfurnished loft, the thankless auditions, the odd assortment of survival jobs (everything from proofreader to bank clerk) that he took in order to pay the rent.

"My sister even commented on it," Pullman says. "She said I was walking differently; I had more confidence."

He still does. There is a sure-footedness about Pullman, something of father's stride, perhaps, that allows him to move though Hollywood's slippery corridors completely on his own terms, that allows him to drive pickup trucks and hang out in hardware stores. Something that allows him and Tamara to raise three children in an overgrown farmhouse five minutes from Hollywood and Vine.

"Affluence tends to be a bit of a problem for me," Pullman says, explaining why he chooses not to reside in Brentwood or Malibu, the places where movie stars usually live. "And it's not that important to us to have a manicured lawn."

"That house is a real extension of who Bill is and how he lives," Hunter says. "Bill's a nice guy, a great guy. But he also doesn't care what people think."

What Dean Devlin thinks is that Pullman now stands on the brink of major marquee-value clout. Devlin's been saying for months that Pullman's price tag would skyrocket as soon as Independence Day hit theaters. Unfortunately, he said it before the actor had signed the Supertanker deal.

"I don't care," Devlin says, sounding decidedly unproducerlike. "There are actors out there getting 12 to 20 million dollars. If you can get Bill Pullman for 7 million, you should be dancing."

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