Welcome to Collider's first ever digital cover issue! We're looking to go deeper than ever with our interviews and bring you premium entertainment content with the biggest names, up-and-comers, and taste-makers in the industry and it all kicks off here.

Our inaugural profile centers on Alex Wolff, the young actor from Patriot's Day and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, who delivers a benchmark performance in A24's blistering horror film Hereditary, in theaters this weekend. We dive deep with Wolff, from his childhood acting experience in The Naked Brothers Band to his music career, the creatives that inspire him, and his goals as a bourgeoning filmmaker.

If you haven’t already, don’t be surprised when you start noticing Alex Wolff everywhere. The 20-year-old actor has been in front of a camera since he was six, or “since the sonogram” as he likes to joke, but the past three years were busier than ever, and with the searing horror movie Hereditary headed to theaters, Wolff is about to unleash the boldest performance of his career.

The benefit of being in front of the camera since the sonogram is it makes you comfortable. Up there in the spotlight, Wolff couldn’t be more at home. Whether he’s trash talking before a competitive round of trivia – leaning right into a stranger's face, “Look me in the eye, Cowboy” – or spouting off questionable accents during a photo shoot, Wolff is always putting on a show. It’s just what he does.

With the photographer snapping away and a video crew filming behind-the-scenes footage, Wolff alternates between posing for the photoshoot – small, subtle poses; kicking out a foot toward the camera or nipping the aglet of his hoodie’s drawstring between his teeth – and mugging it up for the video camera. In between, he picks up his phone and trains the camera on himself for a quiet Facetime chat. Cameras, cameras, cameras. Cameras all the way down.

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A New York native, Wolff grew up in Manhattan; a city kid in a tight-knit showbiz family, who started earning fans at the age of six. Directed by his mother, Polly Draper of Thirtysomething fame, he appeared alongside his brother, Nat Wolff, in The Naked Brothers Band. The film launched a Nickelodeon series that ran for 42 episodes, starring the real-life bros as tween rock stars – they even wrote and performed the music themselves, an early showing of the multidisciplinary approach to creativity Wolff still embraces. He likes to reference a quote from Ethan Hawke; writing, acting, music… the arts are all “fingers on a fist,” stronger when they’re together. At this point, as a multihyphenate actor-musician, and soon, writer-director, Wolff’s “fist” is getting pretty strong.

The Naked Brothers Band was a long time ago, and the Brothers themselves have come a long way, carving out individual careers in the film industry, but that early experience made all the difference. Wolff credits it with teaching him how to be free and uninhibited on camera, “I learned everything super-early,” he says. “The first thing you learn is that this stuff is really lucky, and I feel lucky to be part of it, all the photoshoots and the red carpets and all this stuff, you're really lucky to be able to do that.” A pause. “Whatever. But in a certain sense, it's sort of a means to an end, and it's not the thing that matters. Since I was young, what mattered was what was going on when you were acting, and what was going on when you were doing these amazing things on camera.”

For Wolff, it’s all about what’s happening on that camera, and it’s all about that freedom of performance. “I find that as I get older, all I try to do is unlearn whatever it is that I've learned in the past, and try and return to whatever it is that I had as a kid that was sort of unhinged and nuts.”

The only time Wolff doesn’t seem comfortable is just for a moment when we abscond to the green room for our interview. In the quiet, away from an audience, his demeanor changes a bit. He sits cross-legged on the far end of the couch, top foot tap-tap-tapping in the air at rapid fire. He draws symbols in the velvety fabric, distracted. Maybe it’s not so much nerves as it is a side-effect of trying to tamp down all that energy and redirect it, because it’s barely a matter of minutes before he loosens up again and leans in; engaged, attentive, and of course, entertaining.

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Wolff has two immediately apparent qualities that you can’t teach an actor, no matter how talented: a game-for-anything willingness that allows him to dive head-first into whatever the day brings — the photoshoot, the trivia contest, the interview, viral videos, whatever — Wolff always goes all-in. But on the razor's edge of that freewheeling energy, at the eye of the performative storm, there's a pensive stillness and a streak of earnestness, which he often deflects with wit. Wit served so dry it should come with a lemon twist. Wolff isn't exactly easy to laugh, but he's eager to joke and prone toward repartee.

When I ask about his goals for the future, he quips, “World domination. Better be president.” But after a beat, he answers with a mix of optimism that exposes his youth and realism that belies it. “I want to be super happy,” he says, “I want to be able to look back on the years and be proud of 70% of what I did. Or the films I did, to like three or four scenes in each of those.” When I tell him that’s an admirably mature and reasonable goal (the kind of clear-headed ambition most of us could benefit from at such a young age), he quips again. “Also, three Academy Awards.”

Looking toward the future, Wolff is all about The Cat and the Moon. He wrote, directed and starred in the film, which follows a young man (played by Wolff) to New York City after the death of his father. He describes the movie as his baby. In that sense, he’s a young father. Wolff wrote the script when he was fifteen and spent the last five years refining it, evolving it, and maturing the writing in tandem with his own growth. “It’s a part of me,” he says about the film. “I love the story so much, and it means so much to me that no matter how many dead zones there were and people trying to tell me it would never happen, I never let it crush my ambition to make it.”

To play the role, Wolff shaved his head and put on twenty pounds. “It may be hard for the naked eye to notice my 20-pound weight gain because I'm such a thin guy,” he says, “but it was a huge change for me.” He spent hours in the gym, daily, eating twice as much as his regular diet. “I felt way tougher, I walked a little differently, and I felt way healthier, and like I had an outlet to unleash all of my stress of putting a movie together.” He says the physical change, the added size and physical presence, made him quieter. He imposed himself less, talked less (though he jokes we shouldn’t check that with his family or producers) and listened to others with more confidence.

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As the director, Wolff was all about that freedom of performance he holds so dear. “I wanted the acting to be the priority from everybody, so I wanted it to be completely based around the actors and based around everything that was going on.” He worked with his DP to make sure there was a sense of freedom, designing shots to let teenagers run wild through the streets of New York, “I really just wanted it to be like the camera is completely just finding stuff with them.”

As of now, Wolff is in the edit. “I always joke that writing a script is like the flirtation and the beginning of dating, shooting it is like falling deeply in love, and editing is like marriage,” Wolff says. “When I told this to my mother, she added that the release of the film is the divorce. Not looking forward to that part.” Sometimes he feels good about the film, sometimes he’s not so sure. “It kind of changes day by day. One day go home feeling like you made the greatest movie of all time, and then another day, you go home feeling like you made Porky's 3." But he is unequivocally proud of the film, and obviously in love with the story. He even got a tattoo for the film – a cat and a moon, naturally.

Wolff has ambitions outside of filmmaking, too. He wants to learn how to cook a soufflé. He’s a terrible cook, it turns out. “Burn-the-house-down bad,” he says with a mixture of exasperation and determination. “That's why I want to learn how to fucking do it.” See, Wolff also extremely competitive. Extremely. "I get so heated," he says nodding his head with a smile. He’s nervous about the trivia contest and the foot is tap-tap-tapping in the air again. He doesn’t want to lose. It’s a close match, and he puts on a good show (leaving a scribbled note of pre-game trash talk on his opponent’s whiteboard -- “Your family doesn’t love you.”), but he’s outmatched in the final round. Wolff takes the loss well though, at least on the surface. The hardest losses to take have been the roles he didn't get. That, and losing a game of basketball to his brother. "Now I kick his fucking ass in basketball."

Fraternal rivalry? Maybe a little, but the healthy kind. It'd have to be considering how long the pair have been collaborating, and they have every intention of continuing to do so, even as they take massive strides to establish their solo careers. As their stars continue to rise, scheduling has become a significant challenge, but Wolff says they follow their instinct, don’t overthink it, and most importantly, focus on the project at hand. "It's the best. We'll never stop making music."

Wolff is intensely passionate about music, snapping up with energy and zeal when he talks about it. His gestures get bigger, his eyes wider. He’s listening to rap “almost exclusively” at the moment, though he loves going back to the old standards; Simon and Garfunkel, The Beatles. The enthusiasm continues to grow as he starts to rattle off the names of artists and albums he can’t get enough of right now. Migos’ ‘Culture II,’ “really digging on that,” Beerbongs & Bentleys, War on Drugs, Aesop Rock, ‘Currents’ by Tame Impala, ‘Mind out Wandering’ by the Astronauts. He’s also digging some throwback soul a la Al Green and The Emotions.

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We're half-way into the next question when he stops, pauses and apologizes. "You know what's number one?" He says, “I completely forgot, and it's the crowning [one], is Frank Ocean, "Blonde." I think it's one of the best albums I've ever heard, and that was a serious inspiration for me and my brother.”

Their last album dropped at the end of 2016, and while they’re “always actively working on stuff,” they’re in no rush to get the next one released. He jokes that his boy Frank Ocean took ten years between albums, so you never know. “I don't believe in albums coming out like a year apart, six months apart. I think albums should kind of build up your thing, you don't just want to put shit out.”

On the set of Hereditary, he listened to Colin Stetson, the film’s composer (though he admits he sneak-listened to some of Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Damn,’ because how could you not?). But Hereditary was not an easy movie to make, especially considering Wolff’s character spends the bulk of the film in the thick of either PTSD or abject terror. Now, he can’t listen to that music at all. “I literally can't still,” he says. “I remember Colin Stetson came on a shuffle or something. I was like, ‘No, no, no.’ I was like pressing the button to stop it.”

As much as he loves music, Wolff is equally as enthusiastic a cinephile. You’ll regularly find enthusiastic mini-reviews or shoutouts on his social media (Something he says is a fun and a useful promotional tool, but he doesn’t value “at all.” “It can be a sickening poison,” he says when we dive into the ills of reading the comments). His final wardrobe change of the photoshoot dresses him plaid patterned red pants, a patterned button-up, and a velvety baby blue jacket that he’s instantly obsessed with. “I feel like I’m in Boogie Nights,” he says, dancing around the photo space. That’s the first of many references to P.T. Anderson, one of his favorite filmmakers. “P.T. Anderson is my boy,” he says with a grin when I point out the third PTA reference of the day. (He loves Phantom Thread and thinks the first hour of The Master is perfect, but then “it really does veer off, like hardcore.”) When he talks about the filmmakers he admires, Anderson is top of the list and in good company with Kenneth Lonergan, Josh Mond, and Robert Eggers. And Martin Scorsese. “Obviously.”

Wolff also admires Peter Berg and counts himself lucky to have had the opportunity learn from the filmmaker first hand on Patriot’s Day — the Boston Marathon bombing thriller that marked a significant level-up in Wolff’s career, introducing him to his biggest audience yet. In the film, he took on the role of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two terrorist brothers behind the Boston attack. It’s a role that challenged him in profound ways but also rewarded him with some of the best working experience of his career.

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He learned a lot from Berg, from the filmmaker’s lack of preciousness — “He’s a huge personality. He’s loud and tough.” — but especially, his ability to work with actors, flipping the switch into sensitivity, or notching up the intensity when called for. “I remember I was in the car. And it was heated, and I think I was doing a good job. He's like, ‘Good good good, yeah, stop it, stop it, stop the car.’ So, I stopped the car. He's like, ‘Get out.’ Gets me out of the car and starts fucking boxing me.” It was just what Wolff needed in the moment. It was just what the scene needed. The energy heated up, the scene heated up. The proof is in the pudding. “I realized that his energy sets everything, that his energy does everything, and that dialogue is important but more important is freedom of the actors and the immediacy of what's going on.”

He learns from everybody, but Berg's methods stuck with him. As did the methods of Hereditary director Ari Aster, who he says is probably the “biggest genius” he’s worked with.

It’s not hard to see why. Hereditary is a piece of precision filmmaking, which Aster shot-listed and planned to the frame before he even started working with his cinematographer. That precision became the perfect stage for Wolff to deliver the best performance of his young career – a scene-stealing piece of dramatic work he describes as a “journey through the painstaking process of grief." A performance that pits him up against an all-timer performance from Toni Collette, putting them both through ringer until they’re dripping with sweat, blood and tears (literally – it’s a brutal movie). Wolff proves himself up to the task.

Wolff has appeared in a steady stream of dark dramas over the last few years, kicked off by Patriot’s Day. 2017 brought festival hits The House of Tomorrow and My Friend Dahmer, which boosted his profile in the cinephile community, while a supporting role in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (he plays the teenager trapped in The Rock’s body) introduced him to audiences internationally. He reunited on-screen with the fam for Stella’s Last Weekend, which sees Draper on-screen alongside her sons, and is in post-production on his directorial debut, The Cat and the Moon, a coming-of-age drama that also confronts the specter of death.

But nothing has been as dark or demanding as his work as Peter in Hereditary, not even close. Naturally, some of that darkness came home with him during the shoot. That’s why he still can’t listen to Stetson's music. It brings the experience of being Peter back, and Peter has it rough. “He essentially internally disintegrates and falls apart before our eyes,” Wolff says. “That's a hard thing to fake, I believe. So on set I would have to be feeling some degree of turmoil inside in order to feel like I was doing this guy justice.” To decompress, he’d go home, order “a shit ton of food” and watch cartoons. That last bit wasn’t just calming, he says, it allowed him to “explore the innocence of the character. "I felt like a little boy when I was recovering from the day's work," he says. "Just eating and watching cartoons. And that was as helpful as anything else for me."

The film, the performance – it’s a benchmark moment for Wolff. “Hereditary really is a unique, once in a lifetime thing,” he says. “It's representative of what I want my future movies to be because it's a powerful, authentic character piece.” And he can already feel the heat around it, weeks before the movie even hits theaters. He says it’s “next-level.” People recognize him, on the streets and in the business. Joel Edgerton recently stopped him for an enthusiastic chat about the film. “You scared the shit out me,” Edgerton told him. He’s about to scare the shit out of a whole lot more people. His bold, singular face is about to become the stuff of nightmares – a shared nightmare that will endure as one of the great cinema freak-outs of all time. “I think that everybody is ready for this,” he says. I’m not sure he’s right, but we're about to find out. Brace yourselves.

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