Why ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ star Lewis Pullman likes to think of Calvin and Elizabeth as ‘aliens’ [Exclusive Video Interview] (2024)

Luca Giliberti

June 4, 2024 at 7:14 PM·6 min read

Why ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ star Lewis Pullman likes to think of Calvin and Elizabeth as ‘aliens’ [Exclusive Video Interview] (1)

On “Lessons in Chemistry,” Calvin Evans loves to blast jazz music and have his own space while he’s working — but what does the ideal working environment look like for the man who plays him? “Creating the perfect work environment is different for everybody. I think it’s also maybe different depending on the project or depending on, like, sometimes, if I’m reading a script that I’m not involved in but I [want to] immerse myself in the world of that script, I’ll try and find some soundtrack to a movie that feels similar to that and I’ll listen to that, usually one without lyrics, preferably, because that’ll throw me off a little bit,” Lewis Pullman shares with Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above). “I disregard all of the naysayers who say don’t work in the bed. I love reading scripts in the bed or journaling in the bed. And I love the couch — the couch with the dog… But jazz music I couldn’t do.”

When Pullman signed onto “Lessons” to play Calvin, the star researcher at the Hastings Research Institute who falls in love with Elizabeth Zott (Brie Larson), a brilliant chemist who works as a lab technician at Hastings, the plan was for him to be in just three episodes of the eight-part Apple TV+ drama. Remaining faithful to Bonnie Garmus‘ bestseller on which it’s based, the show kills off Calvin early in its run, at the end of the second episode when the scientist is struck by a bus while on a run with his and Elizabeth’s newly adopted dog, Six Thirty. But showrunner Lee Eisenberg was so taken by Pullman’s early work on the series that he decided to write Calvin into more episodes, including the seventh, which delves into his backstory. Pullman, of course, shot the first two episodes before reading the script for the seventh, so he andSarah Adina Smith, who directed the opening two installments, came up with their own ideas to bridge some of the gaps in Calvin’s story.

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“It was cool to be able to try and fill in those blanks without even knowing whether we were gonna explore it or not — I mean, we did it on the preface that we weren’t gonna be able to explore it, but we wanted to fill in all the peripheral kind of storytelling, so that it would kind of bubble in beyond the frame — and so that was really helpful,” the actor says. “Sarah is just such a keen, smart collaborator, and she’s such a good filmmaker, and her instinct to do that — I’m just so grateful that she took the time to do that with me and that she had such good ideas about [Calvin]. And there are plenty of little crumbs and Easter eggs in the book that we were drawing from about Calvin. And then some of that stuff we had to lose, and some of it we kept for stuff later on. But I think, in a lot of ways, Lee Eisenberg… had such a good idea of who Calvin was and what would translate well to the screen.”

SEE Interview with ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ director Sarah Adina Smith: Shooting that shocking inciting incident in Episode 2

Not only does the seventh episode, fittingly titled “Book of Calvin,” then offer a full-fledged backstory for Calvin, it also provides viewers who might still be reeling from the character’s shocking demise by the time they reach this installment with a sense of closure. Pullman, however, initially had mixed feelings about Calvin getting this spotlight, especially so late into the show’s run.

“I was really, really excited to keep working on the show because it was such a fun group of people and such a fun story and one of my favorite characters to play. But I was nervous once we added that seventh episode,” he admits. “The structure of this show is so unique, and it works so well, where it’s almost like a little movie in the first two episodes and then you really launch into Elizabeth’s story… I think that it was really cool to be able to explore that, but it’s really nerve-wracking because I was like, ‘Well, the audience has already grown to love this Elizabeth story and [is] invested in this, and so isn’t it going to be awfully confusing if we all of a sudden dive back into the beginning of this and kind of explore a character that isn’t the central character, that the audience knows isn’t alive in this world anymore?’ But once Lee explained to me [that] everything that we informed the audience about Calvin, everything that we learned about Calvin only informs us more about Elizabeth… I was like, ‘Alright, that’s genius. I’m down. Let’s do it!'”

SEE Interview with ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ showrunner Lee Eisenberg: ‘How the past informs the present so much was our North Star’

When Calvin and Elizabeth first meet, they’re both emotionally closed-off individuals who’ve spent most of their lives chasing scientific truths and don’t know what it’s like to be emotionally invested in, let alone develop romantic feelings for, another person. But because the two characters have these qualities in common, they wind up being a perfect match.

“I think that they both don’t particularly like other people that much — most other people — and so obviously, when that is kind of your MO, you might ignore a lot of signals and a lot of opportunities to maybe meet somebody who actually might be an outlier for you,” Pullman argues. “They’re both very much these kind of outsiders — I loved thinking about them almost like aliens… Some of what was so fun about those first two episodes is you’re kind of playing, it feels like, an alien-comes-down-to-Earth kind of narrative in some ways, because they’re operating in a world that just doesn’t make sense to them, and it doesn’t work for them — and they see such a clear way of [what] everything could be and how people could act. And so I think in some ways, when they first meet, their similarities are clashing more than their differences, in a weird way. I think it looks and reads like their differences, but they quickly realize, ‘Actually, no, this is weird, we’re kind of arguing because we actually agree, and this is very surprising.'”

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Why ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ star Lewis Pullman likes to think of Calvin and Elizabeth as ‘aliens’ [Exclusive Video Interview] (2024)

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