If the name Ivy Wolk doesn’t ring a bell, seeing her face will. The indie darling, partly known for the provocations she’s attracted on social media, has found her way into some of the last couple of years’ buzziest projects: “Anora,” “Friendship,” and now the Sundance hit “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” releasing on October 10.
With “Anora,” Wolk attended her first Cannes Film Festival, going viral for fighting, on camera, to get into the actual premiere for Neon’s eventual Oscar winner. Things are different circa “If I Had Legs,” where as Wolk told Indiewire, she “was not being treated like I’m dog food in a bowl” when it came to showing audiences A24’s latest.
Director Mary Bronstein’s latest follows Rose Byrne as a mother spinning out of control as she balances her world crumbling around her, work as a psychotherapist, and a daughter hooked up to a feeding tube. Byrne’s character, Linda, is forced into a motel in Montauk, where she meets Wolk’s character, the sassy concierge of the front desk. The actor has less than 10 minutes of total screen time, but she holds her own opposite Byrne and A$AP Rocky. “I try to basically milk whatever screen time I know I can get by offering a line read that is so undeniable,” she said.
No matter the screen time, Wolk impresses. At only 21 years old, the actor has curated a compelling resume despite, as the New Yorker explained, being addicted to working, whether on screen or putting on stand-up comedy shows around the city. She’s just getting started.
Ahead of the film’s release, Wolk sat down with IndieWire to discuss what it was like to go tête-à-tête with Rose Byrne and A$AP Rocky, having her real-life “Blue Jasmine” moment, auditioning for “Sharp Objects,” and being the one to tell Rocky about Lana Del Rey working at Waffle House last summer.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.
IndieWire: I saw “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” about two weeks ago and was like, “I need to interview Ivy Wolk.”
Ivy Wolk: Yay! Is this article— is this with the whole cast?
No, just you.
Oh, shit! Cool, OK, cool! On the carpet at TIFF, I answered every single person’s questions. I gave a 2,000-word answer on feminism. I’ll talk to fucking anybody about anything. People were asking me, like, “If you could describe this movie in one emoji, what would it be?” And it’s like, “What ever happened to criticism?”
How did you get involved with this project?
So Mary Bronstein wrote a pilot called “Lifted” for A24 and Amazon Prime that will never see the light of day, that I was cast as the lead in. It’s the first and only time in my entire career that I’ve ever been allowed to be at the forefront of something. It is literally under the jail at the Amazon Prime building. Like, A24 saw the tape and they said, “Let’s put this under the floorboards never to be found again.” But Mary wrote that, and I really liked her a lot. She’s just kind of the pinnacle of Gen X womanhood to me, where all of her references are really, very similar to my own, because I am extremely Gen X-coded. She texted me when she was in pre-production for [“If I Had Legs”] and she was like, “I have a part for you in this. The character doesn’t have a name. You can pick the name.” I was like, “Diana.”
She said, “It’s just a few scenes, but will you do it?” And I was like, absolutely, because it was the SAG strike, and I just moved to New York, and I was subsisting off of my child-acting money, basically. I had a little money left over from “Anora,” “The Code,” and that sitcom I did when I was in high school. Mary really took a chance on me in that and then again with, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” I didn’t even have to audition, which was fire and awesome.
You have this lore with how you deliver one-liners, in a way where it’s like, you could say one single sentence, and it just explodes into virality. In your very first scene, you go sort of tête-à-tête with Rose Byrne, and even though it’s quick, it packs a punch.
The thing about acting, and actresses particularly that I love and always watch out for, is that with a weird line reading, even if it’s small or a sort of innocuous kind of throwaway thing, I look for how much detail or idiosyncrasy somebody can pack into one line. I really pay attention to the way comedians perform on screen and character actresses. I always just sort of go for “how much can I stretch this one moment that I have,” because I know that I’m somebody where I give a lot on the set.
Directors like me to improvise a lot, and so there’s always multiple takes. Even if I have, I don’t know, one to 10 lines in the entire film, I’m giving you a lot of material. I’ve come to understand, especially after “Anora,” that I am somebody that inevitably is just going to end up on the cutting room floor a lot. The things that happen in the room that feel so great, are always going to be whittled down, so I try to basically milk whatever screen time I know I can get by offering a line read that is so undeniable, that is so punchy and interesting and strange, that it can’t be shuffled away or you can’t hover the camera on somebody else’s face. I’ve sort of figured out how to insert myself in unnecessary ways.
It’s wild because, although you’re sharing the screen with Byrne and A$AP Rocky, you were still the most memorable for me with the scenes you shared with them. What was it like working with them? Do you have to be cognizant of trying to compete to get your due screen time?
It’s not really like a competition thing, just [that] I know what I must do. I know how, when I play these types of roles, how I am in service to the plot. I typically play young women who do not really self-censor and say these chaotic, combative things that provide the impetus for chaos for the rest of the characters or sort of add strain to the lives of the rest of the characters so that they can go on their big journeys. I know what my asset is. My characters are always in the service of pissing people off.
I know how to do that, and I know how to satisfy that role in a way that allows the rest of the people to get their good reaction shots or moments that make them the hero more than me. I typically play characters where the public response to them is like, “This girl is so annoying, she needs to get shot in the head.” That provides other characters in the scene with me, immediately, the hero route. There’s a utility to what I’m doing, and so I don’t necessarily think of it so much as a competition, but it’s just that I know how to hand it to them for the rest of their narrative journey.
When it came to working with A$AP Rocky and Ms. Byrne, I mean, A$AP Rocky, I understood him as somebody who was extremely famous, but I think his music and his sort of time as a musician at the forefront of culture, I might have just been a little young for that. I wasn’t going in there being like, “I love this man for his music,” but I appreciated him from the standpoint of his public image and the obsession that everybody has with how unbelievably handsome he is.
When I was in high school, I was at the restaurant Escuela Taqueria on Beverly Boulevard with my mother, and A$AP Rocky was sitting at a table outside. My mother and I were leaving the restaurant, and he sort of glanced at my mother, and not at me, at all. My mother was kind of rudely serving major MILF tea, right? He got a smile from her, and I sort of just watched him smile at my mother, and so that was kind of my closest memory of A$AP Rocky.
He had security on set, he’s a very nice guy. His security guard used to work security on Zeus TV shows like “Baddies vs. Joseline’s Cabaret,” and so I got to talk about TV with him. And then his manager was there, who I Googled later and was like an extremely famous and rich man who has one of those cars where it’s the black interiors and then there’s the stars on the ceiling of the car. It was rich as fuck, and he just had this little posse around him, but everybody was so nice and unbelievably kind.
He was awestruck at the entire filmmaking process. On the desk that my character sits at in the movie, there [were] all these little tchotchkes and baubles decorating the desk. I remember they were setting up for a shot, and he picked something up, and he was like, to the prop person, “You put all the pieces together and you made this?” He was so gagged. That was very sweet, and there were a lot [of times] where he was like extremely impressed and easily excitable when it came to everything that went into the filmmaking process, and I found that extremely cute and charming, and he was so kind. I got to be the one to tell him that Lana Del Rey was working at Waffle House. He’s making independent cinema, she’s working at Waffle House.
Rose Byrne was also so kind, so fucking funny, and sweet. My mother’s friend from when I was growing up, named Stephanie Lang, and Rose is a frequent collaborator. My mother went on to not have a single thing to do with the entertainment industry, and then now, Stephanie is this director of television and films. I met Rose at a costume fitting before we started production. I got to be like, “Hey, we know this whole family in common from different parts of our lives.” I knew that she had a lot of really emotional high-stakes things to do in this movie, and yet, in between takes in her sweet Australian way, she would be very casual and chatty. I have never really directly worked with people that famous before. I’ve done mostly indies where it’s people who you can tell are on the rise, like “Anora” with Mikey Madison.
What was TIFF like for you? Especially after Cannes.
If you could even say I was in Cannes. I mean truly, I was really a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and then I had my full Cate Blanchett, “Blue Jasmine” puttering in a bus stop [moment]. This was my first festival not being treated like I’m dog food in a bowl, like, they had a car come pick me up at my Airbnb to take me to the premiere for the press line — I was going to walk, not knowing how it works, and there’s a back entrance and that if I walked, obviously they would not let me in, because it’s like I was just a bitch off the street. Like at Cannes, it was truly like, “OK, go fetch, go fend for yourself, you fucking animal.” I got to feel glamorous and cared for, and it was wonderful. It was really my first festival where I was like, “OK, I can actually enjoy this and smile and laugh because Cannes was really stressful.” I mean, I had fun in Cannes, because the entire “Anora” crew was there, but I made the mistake of, I don’t know, fucking France.
What sort of projects are you trying to get involved with now as you build this repertoire?
I’m trying to get a sketch comedy show off the ground for me to write and direct. I’m currently out for funders, so if anybody reading this [wants to]. I just work a lot. I’ve been lucky enough that the things that I’ve been in, that my resume reflects my personal taste. I think I have gotten lucky that I’ve been in interesting comedies and dramas, and I played interesting roles. I do have a lot of vitriol surrounding my name and my presence, and so it is a thing where it’s like if you’re willing to, you’re also willing to survive the flak that comes from having me be a part of something. And so that’s gotten me in a lucky position where, you know, people who play it safe or make kind of copacetic, easy-to-watch [projects] are not the ones that are looking to me. It’s usually people who are crazy or scandalous or easily cancelable or whatever, people who just have really good, interesting taste.
I would obviously love to work with Todd Solondz. He can’t get a movie made right now, which is crazy, because I don’t know what he’s asking for — I have friends in Bushwick that make features.
I was at a screening he did earlier this year at Metrograph for “Palindromes.” The audience was packed to the brim.
I was there! John Waters is another person who stays struggling to get his work made, and I would do fucking anything for that man. Who else would I love to work with? Nicole Kidman is a lady that works and does literally everything under the sun. That lady would act in the opening of an envelope, and so I’m sure that by virtue of us constantly booking things, we will cross paths.
Let’s get your people on a call for “Big Little Lies” Season 3.
You know, my first ever audition was to be a stunt double on “Sharp Objects.” It’s really great, and I love the book, too, but that was my first ever audition. It was to be Sophia Lillis or Lulu Wilson’s stunt double for roller skating, because I did roller derby growing up. I did not book it, and, now, Lulu and Sophia book all the roles that I auditioned for, of course.
“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” opens in limited release on Friday, October 10.