From playing Leonard Cohen to a conflicted frat boy, Alex Wolff’s recent on-screen roles span life on idyllic Greek islands to toxic college parties. Next up is his second directing effort, If She Burns.
“I didn’t realize how much of a razor’s edge I was walking when I was making the movie, but I really feel it when I watch it,” Wolff tells Deadline about playing Tom Backster in Ethan Berger’s The Line. The film portrays the outsized power and privilege wielded by a fictional fraternity, Kappa Nu Alpha, and the accompanying web of friendships and hazing. Wolff’s Tom, unlike his fraternity brothers, is not from money and is both intoxicated and horrified by the world he inhabits.
Walking the line here meant bringing empathy to a character who is part of a group that behaves awfully. Wolff says: “It’s always a scene or two away from Tom being too soft or too awful of a character to sympathize with, and that’s just the elegance of the script and of Ethan Berger as director (and co-writer, with Alex Russek). This is one of the hardest lead characters to pin down that I’ve seen or read.”
He adds: “I felt it was a really important story. You see this toxic hazing and fraternity culture, it’s ubiquitous at this point and it’s really disturbing. I was moved and horrified by the idea that it’s become the norm in America, that masculinity is measured in how much pain you can endure and how much trauma you can bounce back from.”
The Line premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and Deadline’s Pete Hammond called it “a deadly serious take on college frat houses” in his review.
The film is a study in how young men bond and also in (lethally) toxic masculinity. There’s plenty of men asserting their maleness – mostly profanely and at full volume. “What initially drew me in was male insecurity,” Wolff says. “A lot of times, when you read a script, it can be frustrating how comfortable every character is in their skin. I feel that sometimes when people make a movie, they try and get control of their own life, so they try and make all the characters speak very eloquently. I liked that Tom was so layered and that he was really pretending to be something that he wasn’t. That resonated with me.”
Wolff, although never a member of a college fraternity, went inside one as part of his research for The Line, even bringing on some of the people that opened the doors to their frat house to appear in the movie.
“A lot of kids who have been in these fraternities, two or three years in are fatigued and they feel betrayed,” Wolff says. “They’ve seen things that they feel sort of icky about. This movie, hopefully, is an opportunity for them to reflect on that and the complicated nature of being in a fraternity, and that it really is an antiquated thing.”
Utopia
The cast has both seasoned and next-gen stars including John Malkovich, Denise Richards, Austin Abrahams, Lewis Pullman, Halle Bailey, and Bo Mitchel among others. Angus Cloud also appears. The Euphoria star died last year and working with him has left a deep impression on Wolff. “He is probably the best actor that I’ve ever worked with,” he says. “I now approach acting constantly thinking about him and what he would do. No matter what he’s in, it just never feels like acting, it’s impossible for him to be fake. I really loved and love him and will forever.”
Directing: If She Burns
Having appeared in films including Oppenheimer, Hereditary, and Pig, Wolff is determined to take as much as he can from the helmers he has worked with as he preps for his second actor-writer-director project, If She Burns. It follows his 2019 directorial debut, The Cat And The Moon.
“I’m basically just stealing as much as I can because I’ve worked with some unbelievable f**king directors,” he says. “Øystein Karlsen (So Long, Marianne) is one of the most amazing directors in the world and took on that story in such a simple, direct, emotional way. And I’m taking anything I can from Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer), Peter Berg (Patriots Day), Ari Aster (Hereditary) and Michael Sarnoski (Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One).”
Victoria Pedretti (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) stars as a fiery young woman in If She Burns. She heads to Europe with her family after a trauma inducing accident. There, she embarks upon an affair with an enigmatic neighbor, played by Wolff. As family conflict bubbles, a series of mysterious and dangerous wildfires break out and tension rises.
Asa Butterfield (Sex Education) and Justice Smith (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) also star. As well as penning the screenplay and directing, Wolff produces alongside Jay Van Hoy and Andra Gordon. Mister Smith launched international sales on the movie this week at the American Film Market and WME is repping North American rights.
“It’s a dark but also warm and emotional thriller,” Wolff says. “One of my favorite genres that you don’t see too often, is a movie that moves propulsively, but also is emotional, fragile, and vulnerable. I was very inspired by films like Through a Glass Darkly and, and there’s elements here of My Night at Mauds and La Ventura.”
That’s a heady roster of films to namecheck and the actor, musician, writer and director Wolff quickly qualifies: “It’s not to say it’ll be as powerful or as evocative as any of those, but they’re certainly reference points. They all give you a similar feeling of not being quite sure of the direction that they’re going in.”
Ahead of production getting underway, Wolff says If She Burns will “keep you on the edge; is everything going to crumble, or are we going to feel some kind of light at the end?”
He adds: “I’ve always been interested in that question, and we ask it through this woman, this lead character, who’s a powder keg, an emotional explosion of a person.”
Leonard Cohen: Shock & Awe
‘So Long, Marianne’
Nikos Nikolopoulos, Redpoint
Wolff is in a band with his brother Nat. The duo started out on Nickelodeon musical comedy The Naked Brothers Band.
In So Long, Marianne, Wolff plays Leonard Cohen opposite Thea Sofie Loch Næss (The Last Kingdom) as Marianne. The series explores their time on the Greek island of Hydra where the pair lived in the 1960s. They joined Australian novelists Charmian Clift (Anna Torv) and her husband George Johnston (Noah Taylor) as part of a bohemian set exploring a world of free love and artistic freedom. The series has sold widely for Cineflix Rights although there is not a U.S. deal yet.
“It was a privilege to basically eat and drink the words and music of Leonard, but also I was overwhelmed and terrified by the entire experience, and I still am, even talking about it, because I was in awe,” Wolff says. “I didn’t always think about the end result. I just tried to enjoy every second of the poetry, being in Greece, the style and the clothes and the history. I didn’t think about it as performance.”