Bill Pullman probes another ‘Sinner’ in USA series’ Season 2
If Bill Pullman knows the phrase “Sin no more,” he’s putting it aside for work purposes.
Actually, he doesn’t have the title role in USA Network’s “The Sinner,” but he returns to take the lead as the drama’s second season starts Wednesday. First-year star and current Emmy nominee Jessica Biel continues as an executive producer, but the focus is now on someone else who commits a shocking, inexplicable crime: an 11-year-old (Elisha Henig, recently of “Alex, Inc.”) who kills his parents.
The investigation draws Detective Harry Ambrose (Bill Pullman) back to his rural New York hometown, where an old friend (actor-playwright Tracy Letts) and a mystery woman (Carrie Coon, “The Leftovers”) factor into the case. Season 1 of “The Sinner” adapted a novel by Petra Hammesfahr, and Pullman admits he didn’t foresee a continuation. “I’m not that used to television,” the amiable actor says. “I really have not worked that much in it, and I’ve seen how much has come and gone over the past 10 years or so. I’ll think, ‘Oh, I want to watch that,’ then it’s gone. It’s such a high-stakes game, I was just happy to have done one complete set of stories.
“Those started to air while we were still filming,” Pullman notes, “and that was kind of unnerving for me. It’s like trying to release a movie and do publicity for it while you’re still shooting it. I’d been warned by so many people that the (ratings) numbers go down in the second and third weeks, but that didn’t happen.”
Pullman appreciates the second-season circumstances “The Sinner” gives his alter ego Harry: “It’s a situation of the right hand understanding what the left hand is doing. That was on Jessica’s character the first season, and it shifts to Harry in the second, along with other people. There’s more pressure on him, and he unearths his own noble side.”
As with many movie-based actors who do series now, Pullman has found the shooting schedule of “The Sinner” a major appeal of the job. It lets him keep pursuing his film career, which has yielded such popular features as “Independence Day,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Spaceballs” and “While You Were Sleeping.”
“Last year, I did a bunch of different things, from ‘Battle of the Sexes’ to ‘The Equalizer 2’ (which is in theaters now) and a Western called ‘The Ballad of Lefty Brown.’ And then to come back to Harry Ambrose, that’s a lot of different roles to exercise.”
For now, Pullman is pleased to get a second shot at “The Sinner” and at Harry. “You realize you’re never done with the process of self-examination,” he reasons, “trying to understand the larger aspects of what it means to be human.”