There’s always a research component when playing a public figure like Leonard Cohen, but at some point do you need to reconcile with the fact that you’re doing a take on this person, and give up trying to imitate them exactly?
ALEX: I mean, honestly, I tried not to think about it intellectually very much. I just pursued what felt right . . . You can work all you want, and obviously I consumed every bit of information I could get my hands on. I believe the two things that really helped were reading his poetry — getting into those works was the most impactful thing for me — and also reading the books that he read . . . I felt closer to his sensibility and his taste.
Then, the No. 1 thing was interacting with Thea. It was all theoretical until I got in the car with Thea, and it brought me to life. I do feel like anything that works about my performance is because of Thea . . . and anything that doesn’t work is my fault.
THEA: For me, playing Marianne, because it’s extremely overwhelming and terrifying to take on something like that, I was like, my job here is not to imitate her. It’s, in the best way possible, to get her essence and what is important about her story — and show that she was a human being and not just this beautiful muse that you may have heard her name in a song. To tell her story.
That said, does this series on some level interrogate the tricky, problematic concept of the “muse?”
THEA: What’s important for me in taking on this role is to show that she was much more than a “muse.” You want to be a collaborator — not just the woman sitting by the artist’s feet . . . I hope we kind of challenge the notion a little bit.
Is it intimidating at all to try and do justice to an epic real-life love story?
ALEX: As Leonard says, “It depends on how you have the binoculars trained.” You can either see them as “Leonard & Marianne: The Great Romance of Our Time,” or you can just see them as two young people. Often, I tried to think about the latter, think about them as individuals, and find what was really going on — not look at it in that bird’s-eye view. You can’t act from above everything. You have to sort of be on the ground. I just tried to stay on the ground as much as I could . . .
THEA: . . . because they were on the ground. To them, this was their life. They didn’t know the impact their love story would make — or his career, which direction it would go. The greatest gift of the show was just being there with Alex, being present together and letting whatever would happen happen.
What was it that brought Marianne and Leonard together?
THEA: Well, I think they were both people who were searching for something, and they were both very lost at the time when they found each other — and could save each other, in a way.
Conversely, in the end, what was it that drove them apart?
ALEX: What drives anyone apart? Things happen as they happen. I think that they both did their best. They did things wrong. They hurt each other the way people hurt each other. But they stayed in each other’s lives, they stayed loving for their whole lives — so, I don’t think it would be fair to say anything “drove them apart.” They did the best that they could for each other, and I heartily believe that.
See our other So Long, Marianne story here.
The series finale of So Long, Marianne airs Wednesday, November 6, on Crave1; also streaming on Crave
MEMORABLE ROLES:
A native of New York City and a rising star in Hollywood, you’ve seen Alex Wolff in 2018 horror masterpiece Hereditary, as a teenager grappling with an accursed inheritance; the new Jumanji flicks as a pre-video-game-transformation version of Dwayne Johnson; and more recent hits like Oppenheimer and A Quiet Place: Day One. Meanwhile, Norwegian actress Thea Sofie Loch Næss is best known to North Americans as wicked Viking seer Skade in Netflix’s The Last Kingdom.
CURRENT GIG:
This eight-part series casts Wolff as Canadian music icon Leonard Cohen, with Loch Næss as his lover and “muse,” Marianne Ihlen. Meeting by chance — long before fame and fortune — on the Greek isle of Hydra circa 1960, their fates become profoundly, bittersweetly entwined. The farewell episode drops Wednesday on Crave.