“You can feel the love between us” Alex Wolff admits about his co-star Nicolas Cage in his latest film “Pig,” and how their bond made the film all the more meaningful. “You either love each other and make really good friends or you don’t,” he explains. “I think the movie could have been really good if we didn’t; I still think it can really work. But I think there’s just another extra, you know, the magic sauce is on it, because we love each other as people really, really deeply,” he says. Watch our exclusive video interview with Wolff above.
Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski in his directorial debut, Neon’s “Pig” stars Oscar winner Cage as Rob, an off-the-grid woodsman and truffle forager, whose truffle-finding pig is stolen. Wolff co-stars as Amir, a rich Ferrari-driving city kid who develops a deep bond with Rob as he tries to find his beloved pet. “Pig” has garnered raves across the board since its release last July of this year, scoring an impressive 97% “fresh” approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes, with the website noting that “‘Pig’ defies the hogwash of expectations with a beautiful odyssey of loss and love anchored by Nicolas Cage’s affectingly raw performance.”
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The film contemplates the profound effects of loss and grief in surprising ways as it also explores how ambition and self-fulfillment sometimes do not necessarily go hand in hand. It’s a deeply personal film from the first-time writer/director, with both Cage and Wolff delivering poignant and often uncomfortably raw and emotional performances.
When asked how the film resonated with him personally, Wolff suggests that every film an actor takes generally resonates with them in some way. He suggests that the film opened his eyes to parts of human behavior that he might not have recognized before. “It boldly highlighted a lot of elements in myself that I didn’t want to deal with,” he explains. People don’t want to deal with how pathetic it can be to want to succeed so badly, especially with being in the shadow of someone in your family, like his dad is. Wanting to impress his dad more than anything in the world is something I’m not foreign to. Being someone who desperately wants to prove themselves by any means necessary, and maybe does it in a bit of a cutthroat, tough and at times embarrassing way, maybe being too brash and too bold in a way that that comes off a little gross and a little pretentious,” he says.
“I think that that’s not far away from any of us, especially entertainers. That was something that scared me and I saw that and I was like, ‘ooh, that makes my stomach hurt watching him try so hard like that,’ and then I thought, but it’s not like I haven’t done that, it’s not like I haven’t been there. I think that it just required me being really honest about the fact that maybe he’s not as far away from me as I’d like him to be.”
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