Nat Wolff Bio: In His Own Words – Video Exclusive, News, Photos

Nat Wolff Biography

Nat Wolff (born Nathaniel Marvin Wolff on December 17, 1994) is a TV and film actor as well as a songwriter and musician. He is the son of Michael Wolff, a jazz pianist, and Polly Draper, an actress and writer. Along with his brother Alex, the family created the Nickelodeon musical comedy series The Naked Brothers Band based on the movie of the same name.

Coming from a musically inclined and affluent family, Nat Wolff took an interest in show business very early on. His mother, Polly, cast him in minor roles in plays she wrote while his father taught him to play the piano. By age five, Wolff was writing his own songs. He is now adept in playing a variety of instruments including the piano, guitar and drums and has taken to composing music as well as playing it.

Nat Wolff and the Naked Brothers Band Movie

The family created a mockumentary-styled film in a semi-fictionalized version of their daily lives. They produced it themselves, calling it The Naked Brothers Band: The Movie. The name came from brothers Nat and Alex based on something they did as toddlers. The movie was produced by their parents and their venture-capitalist grandparents. Young Nat Wolff was behind the entire composition process—writing and performing all but one of the songs himself—and starred in the film alongside virtually every member of his family.

Splitting their time between apartments in Los Angeles and New York where most of the principal photography and interiors were shot, the production was completed in 2004 but had no way of releasing the feature. In 2005, Michael Wolff decided to enter it in the Hamptons International Film Festival where it received positive attention and was picked up by Nickelodeon, who released it with a larger goal in mind.

Nat Wolf and the Naked Brothers Band TV Series

Nickelodeon greenlit a series to be run by Polly Draper, and continued to star Nat and Alex Wolff. The show was an instant critical and commercial success, giving Nickelodeon the highest ratings it had in the 6-11 age range demographic with an average of 2.97 million viewers. As with the Naked Brothers Band movie, Wolff did most of the orchestration and songwriting himself.

In order to keep the series from redundancy and to keep her son from becoming oversaturated, Polly Draper ended the show after three seasons.

Nat Wolff Interview

While promoting The Fault in Our Stars, Nat Wolff spoke to uInterview about his role as Isaac, the teenager whose cancer robbed him of his vision; Wolff decided to take the method approach to act the character. “Well, I wanted to, you know, I met with a real blind guy named Ethan, who really helped me out technically and emotionally,” Wolff told uInterview exclusively. “And then when I actually did the movie I would wear blinding contacts so I didn’t need to fake it at all.”

Nat Wolff in Palo Alto and The Fault in Our Stars

Wolff began to transition more towards acting and has appeared in supporting roles in Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto and in The Fault in Our Stars.

In Palo Alto Wolff plays Fred, a high school student with a penchant for chaos. His antics were not always played for laughs, and the character of Fred was largely written and performed with him being considered an antagonist. Given the fact that Wolff had essentially been playing himself until this point, the fact that he was so deftly able to play Fred so well earned him particular praise upon the film’s release.

Most recently Wolff played a supporting role in 2014 hit The Fault in Our Stars directed by Josh Boone and based on the novel of the same name by John Green. Wolff plays Isaac, a young man stricken with cancer that has robbed him of his vision. Reaction to his performance has been overwhelmingly positive, and more than one reviewer has claimed Wolff stole the show from stars Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort.

Wolff also starred in Paper Towns, written by The Fault in Our Stars author John Green, and Behaving Badly, which co-starred Elizabeth Shue, Heather Graham, Selena Gomez, and Austin Stowell; it was based on the 2000 novel While I’m Dead…Feed the Dog by Ric Browde.

He appeared in the 2015 film The Intern, starring Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro. Since then he has been featured in the 2020 film Mortal and the Amazon Prime Video series The Consultant, which has been airing since 2023.