With his significant parts in Old and Hereditary, Alex Wolff has gone from former Nickelodeon kid actor to independent horror star. The latter is a very stressful movie, with various horrifying sequences involving multiple decapitations; it makes Old seem harmless in comparison. It’s no wonder, therefore, that filming it was just as intense as watching it.

Wolff played Peter, a youngster whose life unravels when he inadvertently kills his sister and becomes possessed by a demon’s soul that stalks his family, in the 2018 horror film ‘Hereditary.’

Wolff discusses the emotional toll the film took on him in an interview with Looper.

When Wolff was promoting “Pig,” the Nicolas Cage-starring thriller (and Wolff’s second major picture of the summer, after “Old”), he mentioned the long-term ramifications of his appearance in Ari Aster’s terrifying feature debut, “Hereditary.”

“I’ll tell you that movie did about as much damage to me as a movie can do,” he says, before going on to suggest that the damage included psychological consequences and a lack of sleep. However, now that he’s established a great film career, Wolff is concerned that discussing the bad parts of making Hereditary would be considered impolite. When he explains the drawbacks of being an actor who works on these kind of horror films on a regular basis, he says he doesn’t want to come across as unappreciative of his job.

“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. 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.”

He also recently told IndieWire that he was hesitant to share information about how he prepared for his role in Old because it was frequently the subject of conversations when he spoke about Hereditary. “Almost to the disservice of the performance and the movie, the press really angled on the preparation because people hadn’t seen a movie where people were this raw, in at least years, I think,” Wolff recalled. “They would dig things out of me talking about the process. In some ways I regret it, because it can come across as self-important, or indulgent.”

Next up for Alex Wolff is Pig, an independent psychological thriller starring Nicolas Cage. In an interview with NME last year, the actor dubbed Cage “one of my best friends in the world.”

“He’s one of the greatest actors who’s ever lived,” he said. “He’s one of my best friends in the world now, we talk almost every day. We connected on an emotional level and I felt like he was guiding me across the lake during scenes. He always wanted to do a couple of takes for himself and then he would want to spend a lot of time on my coverage.

“On day one I had to do a scene where I get in a car with him and I have to freak out and start screaming,” he explained.

“I was imitating him a lot – and I said to him before we did the take, ‘listen, freaking out in front of you is like doing a guitar solo in front of Jimi Hendrix.’”