The horror movie role that gave Alex Wolff PTSD
Good actors have been known to throw themselves into their roles with little regard for their self-preservation. Once the cameras are in the play, these artists become a different person entirely as they go in to paint their visual masterpiece onscreen. While Alex Wolff already created a brilliant portrayal of horror in Ari Aster’s Hereditary, the memories of the set did leave a few unseen scars.
Throughout the film, Wolff’s role as the typical teenage stoner gets turned on its head the minute an unspeakable tragedy happens within his family. Feeling responsible for all of the carnage around him, Wolff’s performance as Peter Graham is genuinely harrowing, as he tries to find inner peace while his entire family begins falling apart due to a spiritual force.
Long after he removed the makeup and washed off all the blood, Wolff found it hard to turn off his tortured persona from the film, telling Vice: “It stuck with me while we were filming, and it stuck with me well after. When I started talking about it, all these flashes with all this disturbing shit I went through sorta came back in a flood. It kept me up at night to where I got into a habit of emotional masochism at that point of just trying to take in every negative feeling I could draw from”.
One cursory glance at the film will tell the audience everything they need to know about what Wolff was going through. Even in a few still frames of the movie, Wolff carries all of the emotion in his eyes, holding back tears for half the movie to ensure he doesn’t completely break down on set.
A perfect example of his emotional trauma comes when the tragedy regarding his sister happens in the movie; knowing she is gone but not having the strength to turn to the back of his car and see her dead. That was just a drop in the bucket for what was to come, leading to him running out of his house towards the end of the film before being heralded as the new incarnation of Paimon, one of the many servants of Lucifer.
To get into that headspace, Wolff discussed having to keep all of his internal pain inside to get the results for the film, explaining, “I forced it upon myself rather than the opposite of what you’d usually do in life, which is sit on the heater until it starts to burn and you jump up immediately. I had to do the opposite of that and absorb the pain and let it burn”.
While the results spoke for themselves, Wolff could not get over the internal trauma he put himself through for the role, later recalling, “I don’t think you can go through something like this and not have some sort of PTSD afterwards”.
Despite some of the traumatic scenes that went into the film’s final shots, Wolff would recall that he had no memory of shooting most of the scenes because of how much emotional stress he had put himself under. While Hereditary is never considered a movie for the faint of heart, not even the cast walked away from the film without a few emotional scars on their soul.
