Alex Wolff Opens Up About Channeling Leonard Cohen, Going Aggro for Frat Drama ‘The Line’ and Touring With BFF Billie Eilish
Alex Wolff slides into a plush chair at the Mandarin Oriental in New York’s Columbus Circle and orders a massive breakfast. By his own admission, he’s hungover, but he looks perfectly put together in that East Village kind of way. The Nickelodeon star-turned-“Pig” breakout is wearing a hoodie with the words “San Francisco” emblazoned across the front, the type a tourist might pick up at Fisherman’s Wharf, paired with Alex Crane pants. The previous night, he hit the premiere for “A Quiet Place: Day One”; the latest entry in the Paramount horror franchise finds Wolff playing a hospice nurse who convinces a terminal Lupita Nyong’o to trek into the city just as an alien invasion unfolds.
“I never really let loose at a premiere. I just get nervous,” he explains. “And then afterwards, I’ll go to some pub and get wasted.”
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For the 26-year-old native New Yorker, that meant partying till 3 a.m. with two of his best friends at the Irish haunt D.J. Reynolds, a few blocks from his alma mater, Professional Children’s School. But who’s to argue with his downtime proclivities? After graduating from high school in 2016, Wolff, the son of “Thirtysomething” actress Polly Draper and jazz pianist Michael Wolff, directed his first feature, “The Cat and the Moon,” and began working with the likes of with Ari Aster (“Hereditary”) and Christopher Nolan (“Oppenheimer”).
Not to mention there will be little downtime in the coming months. Wolff has two buzzy projects unspooling: Utopia’s frat-boy cautionary tale “The Line,” which opens in theaters on Oct. 18, and the Norwegian-Canadian drama series “So Long, Marianne,” about a young Leonard Cohen and his 1960s muse Marianne Ihlen (Thea Sofie Loch N?ss). Wolff plays the iconic singer and poet in the latter, which hasn’t set a U.S. release date or platform yet but has received strong reviews in Canada and Norway, where it launched on streamer Crave and network NRK, respectively. And he and his older brother, Nat, who together toplined Nickelodeon’s “The Naked Brothers Band” in the late aughts, just released a single, “Backup Plan.” The indie rock duo, dubbed Nat & Alex Wolff, will open for Billie Eilish on her fall tour, which kicked off in Quebec on Sept. 29.
Wolff met Eilish at an Oscars party last year when “Oppenheimer” and her “Barbie” song “What Was I Made For?” were in contention, and they became fast friends.
“Billie and me and my brother, her brother [Finneas O’Connell] and my girlfriend, Rozzi [Crane], we all have Tourette’s. And I think we all have bonded over that,” says Wolff, who plays six instruments and writes his own music. “Even when I saw Billie on interviews, I said, ‘Oh, she’s one of us.’ We know all the ways that we try to mute ourselves or try and chill ourselves out or soften ourselves for other people, and how nice it is to not have to do that for certain people.” (Eilish has called her tourmate “so fucking talented” and “a musical genius.”)
Wolff connected in similar fashion with his “Pig” co-star Nicolas Cage. “We were both going through something emotionally when that movie was happening, and I think helped each other out,” he says. “But I’ve had a lot of friendships on a set that fizzle afterwards, and this is not one of those. He’s someone that I call all the time and say, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’ And he’ll call me, ‘Hey, man, what do you think about this filmmaker? Is he cool?”
With “The Line,” which also stars John Malkovich, Wolff packed on nearly 20 pounds of muscle and embedded with a fraternity in South Carolina to prepare for the role. “It was kind of like being on Mars, because I grew up a city kid,” he says. “Fraternity culture is like a virus, and the movie shows how you can get sucked into one. The hazing is like the last stop on this awful train. It’s really fucking toxic and addicting for men.”
Playing Cohen in the eight-episode “So Long, Marianne,” which shot in Montreal, Greece and Norway, offered a cleansing tonic. “It was like eating the most delicious meal, and you wanted to just keep eating,” he says of playing Cohen, whose poetry he has been reading since his Nickelodeon days. “I’ve never loved being someone so much.”
And though he came of age as a tween actor in the Nickelodeon fold, he says he never witnessed the kind of predatory behavior depicted on the docuseries “Quiet on the Set.”
“I didn’t watch it because, honestly, I had such an amazing experience and I felt protected,” he says. “But just reading the headlines really upset me. I know all those people.”
After Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” tour wraps in December, Wolff will begin directing his next film, the psychological thriller “If She Burns,” in which he’ll star alongside Victoria Pedretti and Justice Smith. He won’t return for another “Quiet Place” given that his character became a snack for the creatures who use sound to hunt. But he would love to reunite with Michael Sarnoski, who directed that film and “Pig.” Otherwise, he’s open to just about anything if it feels right.
“I’m not super intellectual about it. I think I choose things totally gutterly, the stuff that I
respond to. Things sometimes just don’t work out. But I’ve just gotten unbelievably lucky in my choices,” he says, pausing. “Lucky to even have choices.”
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