Offerings #15: Nat Wolff speaks truth to power

Greetings from Zohran Mamdani’s New York City!! 

Now onto the important stuff: On the How Long Gone podcast, former child star and multi-hypenate Nat Wolff noted the difference between the affect of fans that approach him because of his acting and those that approach him because of his music.

Wolff said, “If people … know me from a movie it’s usually like, ‘Hey so nice to meet you. I’m a big fan. Can I take a picture?’ But if it’s from music, especially from when we were kids, and they’ve been fans since then, it's a completely different energy. It’s intense.” 

I have a hard time believing anyone is that emotionally attached to The Naked Brothers Band’s oeuvre, but I didn’t have cable growing up. 

Wolff brings up an interesting point: it's easy to form an emotional attachment to a musician — a lyric spoke to you, you attended a transcendent concert, you associate a song with a specific time or person in your life, etc. But with an actor, what exactly are you forming an attachment to? Their talent? The projects they pick? A character they portrayed?

“It’s different than an actor … you meet them and you’re not meeting the character in the movie, you’re meeting the guy that portrayed the character. Whereas with a musician it gets really confusing because you are like, you are my childhood,” continued Wolff. 

Clearly, given the actor-heavy focus of Altar Boys, there’s something in the relationship between a viewer and an actor, but it’s not as emotional or easily articulated in an on-the-street encounter. 

Ultimately, musicians are still playing a role — just look at Mk.gee — but the lines are blurred. A song offers a semblance of intimacy, where the camera, costumes, director, and lines separate a viewer from the actor playing their part. 

Earlier this week I watched Being John Malcovich for the first time and a running gag in the film was that no one even knew what film they’d seen Malcovich in. He’s interchangeable with his contemporaries. 

I wonder if in years to come Wolff won’t notice such a stark difference between music and movie fans given the increased access we have to actors on their social media accounts and in rapidly multiplying viral clips. 

RIP TEEN VOGUE: Teen Vogue will be folded into Vogue.com and Conde Nast laid off six staff members in the transition. 

The move is devastating on multiple levels. It feels like the final death knell for media abandoning teen girls as an audience. Teen girls are now left to sort through the cesspool of misinformation and unachievable white supremacist beauty standards on social media without institutional guidance. I just read a quote from a dermatologist that girls as young as eight are coming into her office worried about wrinkles, so that’s awesome. 

Flipping through Teen Vogue as a tween was an escape from suburbia into Culture. It’s how I picked my winter formal dress and found out about Vampire Weekend. And let us not forget, the 2014 Young Hollywood Issue was many impressionable young girl’s first exposure to Timothee Chalamet, even if we didn’t know it yet. So this is a direct hit to the Altar Boys ecosystem! 

Since 2016, Teen Vogue also provided invaluable reporting on politics that broke down social justice issues from necropolitics to courtwatching to an audience beyond teen girls. It also published my favorite Jack Harlow profile in 2022. 

NEW GUY JUST DROPPED: Vulture dubbed Mason Thames as the most famous man in America right now. And I’m confident many of you don’t know who he is. He’s been in three No. 1 movies at the box office this year: How To Train Your Dragon, Black Phone 2, and Regretting You. Fran Hoepfner wrote, “He’s essentially the boy king of IP, indicative of audiences who care much more about seeing something they already know than seeing stars enact something with ‘vision’ or ‘point of view.’” He embodies the movie star in an era where people don’t care about movie stars! 

I do recommend you try to catch Regretting You while it’s still in theaters, not because of Thames’ performance, but because you’ll be bonded with your theater-mates for life. It’s a Colleen Hoover adaptation that’s so tonally insane filled with absurdly generic dialogue. Trust me when I say you’ll be keeled over laughing surrounded by strangers doing the same. 

JACK HARLOW discovered his taste in movies. The white rapper from Kentucky recently watched two movies he confidently did not like. After watching The Devils he wrote, “Opposite of my vibe.” He reviewed Woman Under the Influence with two words, “Completely unpleasant.” It’s been a beautiful journey watching him get to this point. 

In other Jack Harlow Letterboxd news, the site was briefly down Thursday morning and quite literally the moment it came back up he logged Reality Bites. You have to imagine him hunched over his phone in the stu’ obsessively refreshing until he could tell the world he watched the 1994 Ethan Hawke flick…

NIALL HORAN was ROLE MODEL’s Sally Diva. A role he was born to play! He stomped his feet, shimmied his hips, acted out the lyrics, and sang along to every word. And so what if I teared up watching the video? Sorry, I love joy! 

HARRIS DICKINSON shared his top 10 films in the Criterion Collection and his descriptions are just as lovely as you think they are. He wrote, “When I’m not working, going to the cinema is kind of all I do; I fill up most of my week with that.” We’re so alike in that sense. 

ROLE MODEL is “Certified Sexy.”