George C. Wolfe

Award won Role or nomination

1. 1954 age 0

   Born

2. 2004 age 50

   CreditGarden State

3. 2006 age 52

   CreditThe Devil Wears Prada

4. 2020 age 66

   CreditMa Rainey's Black Bottomdirector

• WFWendy Finerman1 title
• JPJim Parsons1 title
• SSStacey Sher1 title
• DDDanny DeVito1 title
• JHJoshua Harto1 title
• AHAnne Hathaway1 title
• NPNatalie Portman1 title
• IHIan Holm1 title
• MWMichael Weston1 title
• ADAnn Dowd1 title

• Smashing things together. Because, culturally, that’s America at its most interesting. It’s things connected, awkwardly, that produce the brilliance. It’s not absoluteness that produces the brilliance; it’s when things that don’t belong together collide, and in that collision, something springs forth, and that becomes extraordinarily fascinating to me.

  George C. Wolfe, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it’s rhythmic control. You’re crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender. It takes you probably five to six minutes to build trust with an audience. A musical you can build trust in three notes. Boom, boom, boom, you’re instantly seduced. So musicals have this easy potency, but generally, in my opinion, they waste them, because a musical is incredibly hard to do…

  George C. Wolfe, CC BY-SA 4.0

• I think it’s that a musical must maintain buoyance. Most musicals are informed by very rigid archetypes. If you get a very sophisticated mind writing them, you sense something else, but it’s a folk-art form, really, at its best…

  George C. Wolfe, CC BY-SA 4.0

• There are fundamentally two schools: You stand where you are and demand that actors come to you, or you go to where they are. It’s not just with actors, it’s designers, too. You go to where they are and you try to cajole, woo, seduce, engage, empower them to go on the journey that you think they should. I generally employ [those methods], because I really believe that if you force an actor to do something, there’s a piece of them you never get back…

  George C. Wolfe, CC BY-SA 4.0