Bill Pullman and Geena Davis are back on the same screen again, this time in Netflix’s The Boroughs, more than three decades after they played husband and wife in A League Of Their Own. Pullman says the new reunion brought him back to the 1992 film in a very specific way: the limp he gave Bob, the husband of Dottie Hinson.
Pullman, who appears near the end of A League Of Their Own as Bob, said the character was written as a wounded World War II veteran and that the script called for him to have been shot in the foot. During rehearsals in Chicago, he noticed director of photography Miroslav Ondříček walking with a limp, then watched Tom Hanks decide to carry a limp into the production too. “This is kind of interesting, you know, to be doing these scenes, and he’s kind of there watching rehearsals, and he’s limping. And then in comes Tom Hanks, and I realized he’s decided to have a limp,” Pullman said. “This is a lot of limping people here, I might have to change [my performance].”
So he did. Pullman said he stayed with what Ondříček was doing and copied it, shaping Bob’s movement around the real limp he saw in the room. “My leg’s not really broken, but I’m acting it, and I just wanted to be as real as possible,” he said. “I just stuck with watching what [Miroslav] did and mimicked that.” It gave one of the film’s smallest roles a lived-in edge in a movie that has lasted far beyond its first run.
That older film, directed by Penny Marshall, was built around the All American Girls Professional Baseball League and helped turn Dottie Hinson, played by Davis, into one of the most remembered characters of the era. Davis said she felt a “natural connection” with Pullman when they worked together in the past, and the two had already appeared together in The Accidental Tourist in 1988, after Anne Tyler’s novel was published in 1985. Their reunion in The Boroughs lands differently because the new project is not a nostalgia piece at all: Davis stars as Renee, a former music producer living in a New Mexico retirement community, while Pullman plays Jack, who befriends Alfred Molina’s Sam Cooper in a science fiction mystery series produced by the Duffer brothers and their shingle Upside Down Pictures.
The friction point is that Pullman’s latest reunion comes wrapped in an ending he can barely escape. Jack dies at the end of the first episode, killed by a mysterious creature that Sam discovers siphoning brain fluid from Jack’s sleeping body. Pullman said he liked not having to carry the series through later episodes, a relief for an actor who had once been reluctant to sign up for a five to seven year television contract. “Oh Jesus, sign me up,” he said of the shorter commitment, adding, “Yeah, I wanted it.” For a performer who once slipped into a war wound by watching the people around him, The Boroughs gives him something else: the chance to come in, make the part count and leave before the long haul begins.
