Just like a loving couple, both Wolff and Loch Næss attribute their successes to the other. “When she shows up the way she did, everybody gets great,” says Wolff. “I was just there, watching her, watching what she was doing and feeling. She’s an open vessel, every feeling comes up, radiates on her skin. It was magical to just sit there, it made me look like I was doing something more interesting than I was.” 

Their mutual awe as actors translates on screen as a deep and mysterious infatuation. The facts of their life coalesce together in the orbit of their gravitational pull. The crew of bohemian expats, played by Jonas Strand Gravli (Ragnarok), Anna Torv (Mindhunter) and Noah Taylor (Peaky Blinders), weave their lust, jealousy, and passion into a delicate webbing, forming the unstable foundation for Cohen’s earliest forays into poetry and songwriting. Together with Wolff’s seance-like channelling of the Canadian legend, they all conspire to conjure an uncanny verisimilitude. 

“When you’re there on Hydra, this tiny Greek island where they lived, and the people who knew them are still there, and we’re walking in their steps, it’s a very special feeling,” says Loch Næss. “I know my reality, but there were glitches in it sometimes.”

Wolff, who shares Cohen’s self-effacement and way with words, was gifted a copy of Selected Poems when he was just 11 years old. Having started his career as a musician actor in the Nickelodeon series The Naked Brothers Band, Cohen’s music has also always lived close to Wolff’s heart. 

“I obviously knew the music, but once I got the job it was all hands on deck,” says Wolff. “I had always loved everything about Leonard, but to have an excuse to completely lose myself in those magical words of Beautiful Losers, Favourite Game, Flowers for Hitler, and The Spice-Box of Earth, is the greatest experience of my life and the luckiest thing. I won the lottery.” 

Loch Næss shares that deep connection to Cohen’s music, calling it the soundtrack to her childhood. Her grandparents would play his CDs ritualistically, and as they aged and her grandmother’s dementia worsened, they would put on his songs to soothe her. “It was the only time you saw a glimmer of the person she was,” shares Loch Næss. “He’s always meant so much and I hope that they would be proud.” 

Countless people hold the Montrealer poet-musician in the same esteem, a fact that weighs on Wolff’s shoulders, and perhaps explains how he so effortlessly embodies Cohen’s slouch. After auditioning for the role with a rough rendition of “Suzanne” and “Chelsea Hotel,” Wolff sealed the deal. “When I found out, it was about twenty seconds of elation like I’ve never had, and then terror from then to this moment right now. It never stopped and really never has stopped.” Terror about what? “Failure, for people’s response, for letting anyone down, for not doing a good job.”

To prepare, Wolff learned Cohen’s first five albums by heart. “I tried to make myself like a jukebox, you throw out a Leonard song, and I could be there,” he says. “I felt like I owed it to him to know the music on that level.” The similarities between Cohen and Wolff abound. Not only do they share a burden of artistic expression, but they work obsessively to rise to the occasion. And all that work pays off. Wolff’s renditions of Cohen’s catalogue will make your hair stand on end. 

So Long, Marianne is streaming now on Crave