Austin Abrams Loves a Challenge

About halfway through the film Wolfs, which quickly became the most-streamed feature on Apple TV+ after its premiere earlier this fall, Austin Abrams can be seen running through the snow-covered streets of New York clad in nothing more than white briefs and athletic socks. Left for dead by the Manhattan district attorney after a drug overdose, his character, known only as the Kid, spends several minutes vigorously dodging the pursuit of two competing fixers, both of whom are vying for supremacy in their very specific field of expertise by finishing this unexpectedly demanding assignment. Those who have seen Abrams before, perhaps in Euphoria or Dash & Lily, will not be surprised by the sensitivity and nuance he brings to the role, but his full-throttle performance here has many calling it his breakout, and opposite no less than two legends in George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

Directed by Jon Watts, of the latest Spider-Man films, Wolfs is a buddy comedy that offers Clooney and Pitt an opportunity to do what they do best, bantering and playing off each other without losing their undeniable charm. As in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven series, part of the pleasure of the film, in which the unnamed fixers are, unbeknownst to each other, both summoned to clean up the same mess, is watching two of the most celebrated leading men of recent decades play into and against their personas. For Abrams, the prospect of acting opposite them was, understandably, both an opportunity and a challenge. “It was definitely daunting,” he admits. “I was kind of hoping I could do a chemistry read just to see if I could do it, being with them. It’s the kind of job that you dream about.”

As the Kid, Abrams is in many ways the emotional heart of the film. Rather than the hardened drug dealer and escort the fixers initially assume him to be, the Kid is, as he reveals in an epic monologue in a dingy motel room, a naïve college student who undertook a drug delivery on behalf of a classmate in an act of sympathy. Amidst the antics and action, the Kid evolves from a problem to be handled into an innocent to be saved. “I could really feel the tone through the writing,” Abrams explains about finding his way to the character. “I just trusted that, and then building it out is just going for the truth of it and making a real person. Building the foundation of [a character’s] whole life as best as you can is the great part of the job.”

Wolfs takes place over a single tumultuous night, from the moment Amy Ryan’s panicked DA calls for help from an upscale Manhattan hotel room until Clooney’s and Pitt’s fixers reach a detente over a sunrise breakfast in a Brighton Beach diner, but Abrams says that embodying the Kid required him to take a much longer perspective. “I like Ernest Hemingway and his writing—it’s precise but full. I think something that I heard him say is that he would write pages and pages and pages and condense it all into one sentence. Or there’d be a certain amount of pages that are in the book, but he would write all these pages before and all these pages afterwards, but then just show this piece of life,” he explains. “I think that these things that we can’t see, we can feel. It’s very important to have all of those other things because it I think creates an air and an energy that’s really important.”

For Abrams, that ability—and responsibility—to build a full life out of words on a page is exactly what he finds so intoxicating about acting. Now twenty-eight years old, he has been performing for over two decades, since he was a child appearing in local stage productions. In the years since, he earned roles in numerous projects from the zombie series The Walking Dead and the John Green adaptation Paper Towns to the popular NBC family drama This Is Us, before his recurring role as Ethan, the sensitive boyfriend of Barbie Ferreira’s Kat, brought him to wider attention. “Theater can serve as a form of expression and understanding and be an emotional release,” he says. “It’s really about the beautiful emotion that you can feel and the communication that can happen through your performance. You’re excavating a life that’s happening inside of yourself and then communicating that with other people.”

Establishing that attachment with his fellow performers and with the audience is crucial to his work, Abrams says. “Storytelling has been around for so long and it does seem like storytelling is really an essential need,” he explains. “Beyond that, the ability to go into other worlds and understand different parts of society that you’ve never understood before and the connections you make there [allow you to] continually learn we’re all the same. There are certain intricacies in the different ways that people live life, but they’re having an experience that you can relate to in another aspect of your life, and we’re all one. The connection is really to me a special thing.”

Wolfs may have been, as Abrams allows, a “once-in-a-lifetime experience,” but as he prepares to embark on the next phase of his career, he continues to seek out new ways to push himself. “Sometimes you don’t really know until it’s in front of you, but it’s things that really have depth to them or things that are challenging,” he says about the projects that interest him now. “What’s interesting is when people say if they’re afraid or have anxiety about something, then they do it. I’m kind of like, ‘I don’t know if that’s the right path, because maybe those anxieties and things are telling you something.’ It feels almost like you’re ignoring yourself.”

Instead, the actor insists on the importance of trusting his own instincts and finding his way to the heart of each performance. “It’s understanding what’s actually going on inside of your body and what your body is leaning you towards, like why you should do it or shouldn’t do it,” he continues. “Any time that people can have a connection through something that you’re a part of or work that you do is a really cool thing. A big part of this work is being of service, communicating, so any time you’re able to do that is really great.”

Wolfs is now streaming on Apple TV+.