Nat Wolff has been really famous a couple of times. The first was in 2007, when his show The Naked Brothers Band (based on his real-life musical group) became Nickelodeon’s most popular kids’ series — that was the kind of fame that got him bullied at his New York City middle school. Then, in 2015, he led Paper Towns, the big-screen adaptation of John Green’s blockbuster YA novel — that was the screaming-teen-girls-following-you-on-a-global-press-tour variety.
Now he’s preparing for the release of a series that features his first starring TV role — and a run alongside Parker Posey and Hari Nef in an off-Broadway adaptation of The Seagull/Woodstock, NY — and feeling further from those days than ever. “A couple of girls followed me home from rehearsals the other day, and it made me realize I barely think about being a child star,” says the 28-year-old over late-morning shrimp tacos in Times Square. “I was really insulated by fame as a kid, but I’ve reached a point where I just don’t care about that at all.”
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It’s an impressively Zen attitude for someone who has been surrounded by the chaos of celebrity — he’s shared IMDb credits with everyone from Selena Gomez and Reese Witherspoon to Robert De Niro — for most of his life. It’s due in part to a very good therapist and the pandemic, which forced him to step away from the anxiety-inducing habit of fixating on his career, but credit must also go to his time on the set of The Consultant. The Prime Video show, which drops Feb. 24, is a dark workplace comedy about a gaming startup that’s taken over by a corporate overlord (Christoph Waltz) who’s hellbent on testing the allegiance of employees (including Wolff and The White Lotus‘ Brittany O’Grady). It’s meant to raise questions of power and autonomy, and Wolff learned to think about the ways the entertainment industry tests actors’ morality and ethics, and to fight off some of his people-pleasing nature. And, on a more tangible level that he’s admittedly a bit hesitant to reveal, to stop smoking.
“I was doing this Tiger King show [for Peacock] that called for me to smoke fake cigarettes and wound up getting totally hooked on real ones,” he says. “Karyn Kusama, who directed The Consultant’s finale, got me off for good. She’s like, Nat, have you ever read a single article? The science is out, this is so stupid.” He realized what he really craved was an excuse to take breaks; now he gets by with stepping outside, taking deep breaths, and turning his brain off.
The Consultant was the first project in a long time that Wolff felt desperate to be part of, despite a learned hesitancy toward expectations: “Sometimes you’re on the fence about [what could] end up being great experiences, and sometimes a project you’re excited about is not good at all.” He won’t give an example by name, but offers an easily googleable anecdote. “I did a movie with Selena Gomez when I was 16 that has a 0 percent on Rotten Tomatoes,” he says. “I now consider it a badge of honor; it’s actually hard to have every person in the world have the same low opinion.” (It’s Behaving Badly, and the audience score is 29 percent.)
These days, Wolff tries to stay out of online discourse entirely for fear of letting it permeate his hard-won good vibes. He doesn’t read reviews — even praise from critics makes him feel a little ill — and has disabled Safari on his phone to avoid stumbling onto something he doesn’t want to see. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t self-aware. He still viscerally remembers reading an interview of his after Behaving Badly, when the reporter describes an inadvertent choke as an attempt to get out of talking about the movie’s poor ratings. After an accidental name-drop of BFF Andrew Garfield prompts a question about his famous-friend group, he feigns morbid embarrassment and takes off for a bathroom reset not unlike the aforementioned choke. “I promise I’m not going to come back and answer this exact question” he says with a laugh. And, of course, he knows people are going to read this profile; when he orders a cup of coffee (yes, with shrimp tacos), he notes that his typical aversion to coffee is legendary enough that if I write about it, he’ll “probably get calls from ex-girlfriends.” Eventually, the discourse will find you.
This story first appeared in the Feb. 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
