If there’s anything we’ve learned from the Ocean’s heist trilogy and Burn After Reading, it’s that a Brad Pitt and George Clooney team-up is always a good thing. Together, the legendary actors have that certain swagger and comedic chemistry that equates to Hollywood gold, so when the first teaser for the Jon Watts–directed action comedy Wolfs—offering up little in plot other than the duo looking peeved to be working together—dropped three months ago, we were immediately seated. In the film, Pitt and Clooney play two rival fixers, referred to in the credits simply as Pam’s Man and Margaret’s Man respectively, who are forced to work together after both are hired to clean up the same job. Used to working as lone wolves, both men, who are highly skilled and considered the best in their field, can’t help but try to one-up each other until the “corpse” they are meant to get rid of suddenly makes a run for it in his underwear.
The aforementioned escapee is known only as Kid and is played by a fantastic Austin Abrams from Euphoria and Do Revenge. As a third wheel alongside Pitt and Clooney, the actor more than holds his own as a likable and nervously chatty young man who finds himself in a precarious situation. Abrams is so wonderfully funny in the film as he runs amok around Lower Manhattan, half naked and screaming, and later as he fancies himself a partner of his kidnappers wearing a women’s blouse and trousers. He is, by all accounts, a standout.
Meeting, let alone working with, your heroes can leave you speechless, and as we chat with Abrams a year and half after the fact, he still can’t quite find the words to describe his experience filming Wolfs, which makes its global streaming debut on Apple TV+ on September 27. He’s still shocked it even happened at all. “Sometimes, I think, ‘What the hell. I did that?’ I can’t believe I did that,” the 28-year-old tells us over Zoom.
The Sarasota, Florida, native grew up wanting to be an actor for as long as he can remember, and outside of taking acting classes starting at age 5 and participating in local theater productions, part of his education was watching Pitt and Clooney on-screen. When his agents approached him about a new Watts project involving the actors, he was in disbelief. Abrams had met Watts once before through mutual friend and director Jake Schreier, but the prospect of doing this film with those guys was overwhelming to put it mildly. It took a good amount of hammering the idea into his head for Abrams to even think he could go out for it.
Then there he was, a short while later, on set with Pitt and Clooney just hoping not to fuck it up. (Spoiler: He doesn’t.) The key for Abrams was to just follow their lead and try to keep up by passing the ball back and forth with them. “You kind of just dance with them,” he explains.
As far as on-the-job training goes, it doesn’t really get any better than working alongside Pitt and Clooney. According to Abrams, the two couldn’t have been more warm to him and are open books with offering up advice. “You learn a lot from just watching, and you learn the most through osmosis really,” he says. “There was a period of time where you started to trust that it’s all going to be fine, and at a certain point, you are all just guys, actors working with each other.” Even then, Abrams’s nerves didn’t feel settled until the last couple weeks of shooting. When you’re sitting across from two acting legends after years of watching them, it’s difficult to fully shake that. In hindsight, however, Abrams says that nervous energy lent itself well to the character, who has a similar sense of awe. Even Abrams’s lack of athleticism—he didn’t quite anticipate how much running he’d actually be doing—served the character well.
Abrams never expected to be in this particular position, going toe-to-toe with two of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars, and we get the sense it’s still mind-boggling for him. He shares that a new level of confidence has come from it. “You’ve experienced one of the most daunting things and found that it’s possible to make it out alive,” he says. This just further proves that anything is possible for one of the industry’s most promising young talents.
Wolfs premieres on Apple TV+ on September 27.
