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Alex Wolff brings darkness and vulnerability to Pig and Old

An image of Alex Wolff in Pig

You may know Alex Wolff from his younger days on the TV series The Naked Brothers Band and In Treatment; more recently he’s turned up in the Jumanji sequels as withdrawn teen Spencer, forced to confront his anxiety and become a hero when he’s sucked into a video game (and transformed into Dwayne Johnson).

The American actor has also been building a sideline in darker material, chasing indie films like Hereditary and Castle In The Ground. And this week, he can be seen in two very different modes: Michael Sarnoski’s Pig casts Wolff as Amir, a hustler who steers Nicolas Cage’s reclusive truffle digger through the Portland underworld, while M. Night Shyalaman’s thriller Old uses him in a very different manner.

Making Pig was a no-brainer for Wolff, who says he signed onto the project for two reasons: “The amazing script written by Michael, and the amazing beast that is Nic Cage. He’d been my guiding light since I was a child, someone I saw as a true artist from the very beginning.”

Wolff can’t offer enough praise for his co-star, even jumping into a fairly physical Cage impersonation at the mere mention of Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans. “He’s like a creature from the sky,” he says. “He’s not even human… he’s, like, the only flower of his kind in the whole forest. Just his own thing. I feel like I won more than a lottery; I won an existential prize, getting to work with him.”

Unglamorous and a little gross

Wolff blanches at my suggestion that directors are attracted to his ability to intimate a certain darkness underneath his vulnerable persona – “there’s probably something within my eyes and my spirit that translates as vulnerability, but I very much resist any type of type, and I dread the idea that anything’s been repetitive or similar” – but eventually acknowledges that he might have a certain quality that appeals.

“I’m less afraid to maybe go to places that other people find… ‘unattractive’ is probably one word, but it’s more ‘unglamorous’ and maybe a little gross,” he says. “Icky. I think it’s icky to find this other side of yourself, and if there’s any through-line in my career, it’s definitely that I like characters who have something buried that they’re trying to maybe repress or fight. A lot of my favorite performances have that. But honestly, I have such a hard time watching myself in anything I’m in that I have no idea what’s coming out. I just know that I’m trying to follow my own instincts for the thing that I’m doing at the time.”

And then there’s Old, which requires him to inhabit a far more innocent character than he usually gets to play. We can’t really talk about it without spoilers, but he’s already figured out a way to deflect any questions about his performance.

“I invested in an amazing time machine,” he declares. “I got a real time machine and went back to being a child and it really helped. It shocked me, just going back and being a kid. You learn a lot of things by yourself with a time machine.”

You can’t look at yourself in movies, I say, but I couldn’t watch myself as a child. It’d be unbearable.

“It was hard,” Wolff laughs. “It was very hard. But the time machine technology made it a lot easier.”

@normwilner

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