Hereditary actor says roles till gives him creeps

Hereditary made a name for itself as being, potentially, the scariest movie a person can put themselves through before it was even released.

In April, the movie’s trailer was shown mistakenly before Peter Rabbit in an Australian theatre, leading to parents and children fleeing the cinema and demanding their money back.

And since its première at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, critics have called it “pure emotional terrorism” and “a ballet of menace,” while the National Post’s Chris Knight admitted to watching most of it “through shaky, splayed fingers.” Hereditary is more of an experience than a film — not just for the viewers, it turns out, but also the actors.

The film follows a family coping with the death of their grandmother, whose daughter is played by Toni Collette. But, naturally, things take a disturbing turn as the family’s grief intensifies. Actor Alex Wolff plays Collette’s son, and in an interview with Vice, he admitted that playing the character took a toll.

The 20-year-old said, “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.”

Wolff added, “It’s hard to describe eloquently, it’s just a feeling. I don’t think you can go through something like this and not have some sort of PTSD afterwards.”

Not only have the flashbacks led the actor to believe he’s experiencing a form of PTSD, but the fact that, after actually watching the movie, he realized he couldn’t recall shooting several scenes.

“Yeah, I mean it’s weird,” Wolff said. “I watched it the first time and I was like, holy shit, I don’t remember shooting that scene. (laughs) I’m not even kidding, I was like, what the f--k is going on? I don’t even remember that 100 per cent, it’s strange how that could all work.”

That, or he went a little too method. Wolff described getting into character by “becoming a black hole” and being “in control of all that darkness.”

A24 VIA AP Alex Wolff says he doesn’t even have recollection of shooting a scene from the horror film Hereditary.