‘I needed Leonard,’ says the actor who plays legendary Montrealer Cohen

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Playing the young Leonard Cohen was anything but just another role for 26-year-old American actor/musician Alex Wolff.

At a screening of the series So Long, Marianne Tuesday for media, cast and crew, Wolff said the work of the Montreal writer and singer-songwriter had an enormous influence on him at an early age.

“I think his contribution to my life personally and emotionally is ineffable, it’s something I can’t really describe,” said Wolff, who stars in the eight-part series alongside Norwegian actress Thea Sofie Loch Naess. “Any time I try to put words to it I feel I come up short.”

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The series, which debuts on Crave Friday, chronicles the fabled love affair between Cohen and Marianne Ihlen, a relationship that inspired several of Cohen’s most famous songs from his early albums, notably So Long, Marianne, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye and Bird on a Wire. The singer met Ihlen, a Norwegian woman, on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960. They were part of a community of bohemian artists living with little money but apparently no shortage of alcohol consumption and extramarital activity. That’s the scene depicted in the first two episodes of the series, which were screened Tuesday.

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The episodes includes black-and-white flashbacks to Cohen’s life a few years earlier in Montreal, where we see his mother, played by Quebec actress Macha Grenon, not so gently suggesting that he needs to find himself a paying job. The cast includes a number of other local actors, including Éric Bruneau, Kim Lévesque Lizotte and musician Patrick Watson, who has a small role and contributed two songs.

“The simplest way for me to put it, and I think a lot of people feel this way, is I needed Leonard, I really needed him,” said Wolff, who appeared in Oppenheimer and whose band Nat & Alex Wolff (with his brother) will be opening for Billie Eilish on her tour, which starts Sunday in Quebec City.

“I felt there was a big hole in my life since I was young and I think only he has been able to make me feel more complete as a person,” added Wolff. “It’s just as simple as, I needed him and I love him and I’ll always love him. And I feel the luckiest human being in the world not to just play him but to go on the journey to get closer to what he wanted and getting closer to the truth, and his truth. I feel like (saying), ‘Thank you, Leonard, thank you so much,’ because I don’t know what I’d be without him. I really mean that from the bottom of my heart and soul and I think a lot of people feel that way.”

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In the first two episodes, Cohen is portrayed as a troubled young man suffering from bouts of depression and struggling to find his place in the world. Ihlen isn’t much happier. She is living with a Norwegian novelist who is rebelling against bourgeois society — a rebellion that seems mostly to involve treating Ihlen terribly and sleeping with a bunch of other women. Cohen, in the meantime, is immediately smitten with the beautiful young woman. The story is also the subject of the 2019 Nick Broomfield documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love.

In an interview Tuesday, Watson said he actually didn’t grow up as a big Leonard Cohen fan.

“My relationship with Leonard is mainly through my mother, to be honest,” Watson said. “My mother was in love with Leonard Cohen’s music. As a kid, I was very much music first, before lyrics. So I’m definitely more of a late bloomer when it came to Leonard. I think that what first struck me was more interviews than his music, and then when I went back to the music I loved it differently. And that’s when I really fell in love with it. Before I heard interviews, I thought the language he used was very heavy-handed and when I was younger I misunderstood the sense of humour to it. Once I learned that, then I enjoyed it a lot more. Even with Bob Dylan I was a late bloomer.”

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You hear Watson’s theme song over the opening credits. The series focuses on the early part of Cohen’s adult life, “so I was inspired by the older style of guitar picking and I got Brad Barr (to play it),” said Watson. “That’s the best person I could think of. I said, ‘Let’s just do the religious choir, the picking and let the rest do its work.’ The melody I wrote when I was jogging, and I did a voice memo and said, ‘That’s the one’.”

Watson was originally supposed to play noted Montreal poet Irving Layton, one of Cohen’s mentors, but Watson said he blew the audition, and the role went to Peter Stormare.

“I literally couldn’t pronounce half the words he says,” Watson said.

Watson loves what he’s seen of the series.

“What I like about this is obviously he’s a very poetic person, so they filmed in a free way where they just let dialogue naturally interact,” Watson said. “Any time there’s a poetic moment, it isn’t like: ‘Here’s a big sentence from a poet.’ It’s just natural. It’s like, here’s a big poet movie. Then when there’s really beautiful moments of poetry, you’re just more receptive.”

The first two episodes will be available Friday on Crave and then one will be released each Friday for the following six weeks.

bkelly@postmedia.com

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