Why Reuben From A Quiet Place: Day One Looks So Familiar
When John Krasinski's ambitious horror film "A Quiet Place" hit theaters in 2018, fans were blown away at the post-apocalyptic vision from one of the former stars of the NBC mockumentary "The Office." Led by Krasinski and his real-life wife Emily Blunt, "A Quiet Place" imagines a world where even the smallest noise can attract enormous, bloodthirsty alien monsters, which attack based on noise because they're completely blind. Ultimately, Krasinski stepped back into the director's chair for "A Quiet Place Part II" in 2020 — and he's set to do the same for "A Quiet Place Part III," which is in the works — but this terrifying universe is expanding. Now, fans will get to see an earlier glimpse into the silent dystopian world depicted in the first two movies thanks to "A Quiet Place: Day One," written and directed by Michael Sarnoski (who created the original concept alongside Krasinski).
This prequel puts Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o and breakout "Stranger Things" star Joseph Quinn front and center as new characters Sam and Eric, who are also joined by Henri, Djimon Hounsou's character from "A Quiet Place Part II." Rounding out the cast as Reuben is Alex Wolff, a former Nickelodeon child star who rose to prominence on "The Naked Brothers Band" alongside his famous brother Nat Wolff — and who's got a seriously impressive resume in his own right. Here's where you've seen Wolff before.
My Friend Dahmer (2017)
After playing a supporting role in 2016's rom-com sequel "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2," Wolff worked on "My Friend Dahmer," an enthralling yet utterly disturbing look at Jeffrey Dahmer's younger years (with the serial killer played by Ross Lynch of "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina"). In the film, Wolff plays real-life cartoonist John "Derf" Backderf, who penned a graphic novel of the same name about his time as Dahmer's friend while they both attended high school in Ohio. Derf and Dahmer were really friends from around 1970 until 1978 — the year Dahmer started committing his now infamous murders — and both the graphic novel and film are a fascinating, unsettling view of what one of the world's most famous serial killers was really like in his younger years.
Within the narrative, Derf and his friends see Dahmer do a cruel impression of his mother (who suffers from cerebal palsy) and end up teaming up with him to pull a number of pranks, all while Derf draws portraits of his new friend. As Dahmer's behavior becomes more and more alarming, Derf has to grapple with the fact that his friend might not be harmlessly odd, but actually dangerous. All in all, "My Friend Dahmer" is a portrait of a murderer before his killing spree began, and Wolff deftly plays Derf from the movie's beginning until its conclusion ... where Dahmer abandons his high school friends and commits his first murder.
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) & Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)
The modern "Jumanji" movies — which includes 2017's "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" and 2019's "Jumanji: The Next Level" — take the original concept of the 1995 hit "Jumanji" and update it for a new era. Instead of a board game that either traps people inside (which is what happens to Robin Williams' Alan Parrish in the original) or releases mayhem into the real world, the new "Jumanji" films place the action inside of a video game, which is where Alex Wolff's character Spencer Gilpin comes in.
Spencer is one of the leads of the first movie ... but due to its narrative structure, Wolff appears in way less of the film that you might think. After the movie opens with teenager Alex Vreeke (Mason Guccione as a young man and Nick Jonas as an adult) sucked into a video game version of "Jumanji" in 1996, we meet Spencer and his friends Anthony "Fridge" Johnson (Ser'Darius Blain), Bethany Walker (Madison Iseman), and Martha Kaply (Morgan Turner), who stumble across the game and also end up trapped inside. Within the reality of a game, they're all radically different — and played by different actors.
As cool, powerful archaeologist Dr. Xander "Smolder" Bravestone, Spencer becomes Dwayne Johnson, and Fridge turns into Kevin Hart's zoologist Franklin "Mouse" Finbar. Bethany, a pretty, popular girl outside of the game, turns into dorky scientist Professor Sheldon "Shelly" Oberon (Jack Black), while the timid Martha transforms into the beautiful, strong Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan). Johnson and his cohorts lead most of the film, but whenever Wolff's Spencer is on-screen, he paints a sharp contrast to his in-game character ... and ultimately, he chooses to re-enter the game in "Jumanji: The Next Level" while he's struggling to find his identity in college.
Hereditary (2018)
In 2018, Alex Wolff joined one of the most legendarily frightening and unsettling horror movies of the modern age — "Hereditary," a wholly original concept from auteur Ari Aster (that also happened to mark his feature film debut). Wolff leads the movie as Peter, the sixteen year old son of Annie Graham (Toni Collette) and her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), who all experience a horrifying trauma right at the beginning of the film. When Peter brings his younger sister Charlie (Milly Shapiro) to a party where she accidentally eats cake with walnuts in it and has a disastrous allergic reaction; on their way to the hospital, Charlie sticks her head out of the car window for air and is brutally beheaded in one of the movie's most famous sequences.
If you haven't yet seen "Hereditary," we won't spoil its absolutely disturbing supernatural twists and turns here ... but apparently, the movie was extremely difficult for Wolff to make in the first place thanks to its heavy subject matter. "I'll tell you that movie did about as much damage to me as a movie can do," Wolff exclusively told Looper, saying that he had trouble sleeping and experienced psychological trauma and. "All of it," Wolff continued. "It really affected me,"
"It's very hard because as an actor, you really don't want to sound pretentious or self-serious or like anything is too serious," Wolff revealed during the interview. "Because we have a cushy job in a lot of ways, but this, emotionally, it was one of those tough ones, it was one of those ones that really did some gymnastics on my emotional well-being." You definitely don't want to miss Wolff's performance in "Hereditary" ... if you can bring yourself to watch it.
Old (2021)
In 2021, master of plot twists M. Night Shyamalan delved into full body horror with "Old," a deeply disturbing and viscerally horrifying film about a beach that causes some very strange side effects for those unlucky enough to vacation there. Alongside Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps ("Phantom Thread") as his parents Guy and Prisca Cappa and Thomasin McKenzie ("Last Night in Soho," "Eileen") as his sister Maddox, Alex Wolff plays Trent, who goes on a beachside vacation with his family when he's fifteen years old. While the elder Cappas stare down an impending separation, they decide to take their kids on one last vacation at a beautiful oceanfront resort, but before long, the family members and their fellow guests start experiencing some wildly strange sensations after visiting a quiet, secluded beach near the resort.
Without spoiling too much about "Old's" twists and turns here, the people on this remote beach start aging rapidly and suffering disastrous health consequences, with Trent and Maddox left to try and figure out what's going on. At various points, Trent is played by Emun Elliott as an adult, Luca Faustino Rodriguez at the age of eleven, and Nolan River at the age of six, but Wolff still serves as one of the backbones of the film while he and McKenzie's Maddox experience increasingly frightening body changes that prove fatal for nearly everyone on the shoreline.
Oppenheimer (2023)
Realistically, it would be weirder if Alex Wolff wasn't in "Oppenheimer," based on just how enormous the cast of Christopher Nolan's Oscar-winning historical epic is in the first place. Alongside Cillian Murphy as the famed theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer — which earned the Irish actor his first Oscar — heavyweight performers like Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Kenneth Branagh, and Rami Malek appear in Nolan's movie, to say nothing of Robert Downey Jr. as Oppenheimer's political rival Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss (which also netted an Oscar for the "Iron Man" veteran). So where does Alex Wolff fit into this massive, decades-spanning story of how Oppenheimer helped create the atomic bomb and was ultimately investigated at Strauss' behest for potential ties to the Communist party?
In the scenes where Oppenheimer and his colleagues work tirelessly on the "Manhattan Project" — which spawns the bombs as America races to try and get ahead of Axis forces — Wolff plays real-life figure Luis Walter Alvarez, a physicist who ultimately won a Nobel Prize in his field in 1968. Wolff's role as Alvarez isn't enormous — after all, the film is jam-packed with stars — but he's excellent in his limited screentime as a brilliant scientist who helps Oppenheimer in his vitally important yet terrifyingly destructive project.