Marvel’s ‘Thunderbolts’ star Lewis Pullman on rumors he’s playing Sentry

Who the heck is Lewis Pullman playing in Marvel’s Thunderbolts?

Even after the star-studded ensemble’s debut at Comic-Con 2024 on Saturday night, Pullman’s character still hasn’t been officially revealed. While onstage during Marvel’s massive Hall H panel, Pullman was referred to as “Bob,” so comic book fans immediately took that as confirmation that he’s playing Robert Reynolds, a.k.a. Sentry, the superhero with the power of a million exploding suns.

When Pullman and his costars stopped by Entertainment Weekly‘s video suite immediately after the panel, he finally addressed those rumors by revealing that Bob is, of course, not his character’s full name. “All I’ll say is that everyone has their own nicknames and Bob is not his only name,” Pullman told EW. “As Lewis is not my only name.”

David Harbour, who reprises his Black Widow role of Red Guardian in the upcoming movie, was shocked to hear Pullman say that. “What’s your other name?” he asked. 

“You just went to dinner with my dad on Thursday; I’m sure he referenced me as Magoo, Lew Magoo,” Pullman replied before getting back to teasing his Thunderbolts character. “Bob is not all he goes by. That’s all I’m saying.” 

This isn’t the first time Pullman has played someone named Bob in a massive blockbuster movie. He recently portrayed Lt. Robert “Bob” Floyd in Top Gun: Maverick, and Harbour joked that’s what the newly-added asterisk in the Thunderbolts title is for: “It means that we are connected to the Tom Cruise universe,” he said with a laugh.

“This is Top Gun: Maverick 3,” Pullman quipped. “There’s a second happening, and then this is coming out in a while. No, it’s very complicated, but that is the general gist. They are incredibly, incredibly different [characters].”

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It’s not surprising that there’s little known about Pullman’s character. When Sentry debuted in 2000’s The Sentry, written by Paul Jenkins and illustrated by Jae Lee, no one knew who he was either. The twist later came that middle-aged, regular civilian Bob Reynolds was actually the Sentry, one of the oldest, most selfless, and most powerful superheroes who had been erased from everyone’s memories, including his own, to save the world from his evil other half, the Void.

That all lines up with what Hall H attendees saw in the first footage from Thunderbolts: Yelena (Florence Pugh), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell) realize they’ve all been sent — likely by scheming Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) — to the same location, where they encounter Pullman’s confused Bob, who’s wearing a hospital gown. He’s surprised to learn that the others were “sent” there, while it seems as if he’s been kept there alone.

“I’ll just say, [there’s] very little struggle being in a hospital gown, compared to these suits that a lot of these folks are in,” Pullman said of his “blessed” costume. “There’s a lot of peeing difficulties that were going on that I witnessed, and I was pretty liberated… It was great to be in such a space of freedom and and liberation.”

Thunderbolts hits theaters on May 2, 2025.