Bill Pullman

Cast · Director

Born

December 17, 1953 · Hornell, New York, USA

Birth name

William James Pullman

“The thing about acting is it's the one thing that gets me immersed in other things. I always come back to acting.” Bill Pullman is an American actor and writer with a solid career in film, theater, and television. Determined to pursue acting, he studied theater at the State University of New York at Oneonta after finishing high school, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Studies, and later completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He began his career on stage and made his film debut in Ruthless People (1986), followed by Spaceballs (1987), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), A League of Their Own (1992), While You Were Sleeping (1995), and Casper (1995). He rose to international fame as President Whitmore in Independence Day (1996) and later stood out in David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997). Other notable films include The Virginian (2000), The Grudge (2004), Scary Movie 4 (2006), Phoebe in Wonderland (2008), and The Ballad of Lefty Brown (2017), which earned him the Excellence in Acting Award at Woodstock. On television, he appeared in the miniseries Revelations (2005), the comedy 1600 Penn (2012–2013), and played a lead role as detective Harry Ambrose in the series The Sinner (2017–2021). In addition to his acting career, he taught at SUNY Delhi and Montana State University. He has also written for the stage and remains active in the theater world.