‘The Sinner’ Star Bill Pullman on Exploring Ambrose’s Childhood Trauma
Detective Harry Ambrose’s (Bill Pullman) willingness to go above and beyond the “who, what and when” of a crime to get to the “why” drove the narrative in the first season of USA’s psychological anthology mystery, “The Sinner.” But from a storytelling standpoint, it also set him up as a specific kind of cop — the kind that cares more about those who have been through trauma perhaps because of trauma he, too, has been through.
The second season of “The Sinner” is doubling down on the depiction of trauma in its characters’ pasts. When Ambrose gets called back to his hometown to investigate a double homicide committed by a teenage boy, he ends up exploring not just the murderer’s past but his own.
“We talked a lot in season 1 about some sources of what was eating away at [Ambrose], but we hadn’t really resolved exactly what the situation was,” Pullman tells Variety. “What we’re seeing in season 2 is that it starts to become clear it’s going back to when he was young. … [It] goes back to when he was in a foster home and the reasons why he was in there. We isolate the event [of] what happened back then that was the traumatizing thing.”
Here, Pullman talks with Variety about exploring Ambrose’s past, his biggest challenges, and working with Carrie Coon.
Turmoil in Ambrose’s past was certainly seeded in season 1 but how much did you feel you needed to know upfront about where he came from and where he was going once you knew season 2 would dive deeper into the details?
I didn’t want to get the sole thinking on where everything is going and would resolve because it allows me to be in the moment and be in a situation that I feel like is more honest. [It’s also one] that you find in life, which is that you don’t know. Especially this season, where there’s many characters that have demands on his energy and focus, like in life, there’s maybe a couple of people that are potentially the ones who could really open him up.
How do you compare the Ambrose the audience meets in the first episode of the second season to the Ambrose that gets explored as episodes unfold?
He’s definitely attempting to live his life standing on the rails, which you kind of see from the first episode. He’s found some boundaries, and he’s remaining more insulated. But the nature of going to stay at his friend’s house, which means sharing bathrooms, and all of [those] things and appearing kind of wanting to be a normal person means that acting out of all of that, putting on the face of all of that, is really what he’s trying to do, but it doesn’t really work that well. … Something happens to him where you don’t really know the full extent of what happened to him up until the very end. All of that is still down the pike for him. The first three are [him] in a way living in denial. All the pressures of who he is and the naming of what happened, the sense of being around this environment…he’s walking the same walks that he did as a young boy. So [how] those things are starting to pop into his consciousness are happening more and more.
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