Although she's got credits in some of the biggest recent productions, your first encounter with Ivy Wolk was probably online. Long before she was on our screens, the 21-year-old actor and comedian was setting social media alight with deliberately polarising (and often very funny) content. But don't try and confine Wolk to one medium. Since 2020, she's been steadily collecting on-screen credits, from Anora and If I Had Legs I'd Kick You to Ryan Murphy's campy adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' The Shards.
If you've been streaming the latter and found yourself entranced and intrigued by Really Rhonda, you're not alone. Introduced in the show's third episode, Rhonda is an eccentric Buckley student with a magnetic disregard for the social codes and a penchant for rollerskating. The character doesn't actually appear in Ellis' original novel, making Wolk's performance one of the more memorable additions to Murphy's adaptation.
So before she really is everywhere, get to know Ivy Wolk, below.
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She's a Virgo
Wolk was born on 24 August, 2004, so she just scrapes in at the start of Virgo season (although we wouldn't be surprised if she had a little bit of Leo somewhere in her chart.
Her parents are also in the industry
Wolk's father works in censoring on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show, and her mother is a landscape architect. Speaking to The Cut, she described herself as an "industry baby," saying, "At a very early age, I was super-cognisant of the idea of celebrity. I always knew that the people on the TV and in the movies were fake."
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She got a role in Anora after DM-ing Sean Baker
And a pretty big role, at that. In fact, the part went to Wolk after she messaged the director with a question she didn't get to ask him at a screening and Q&A of Red Rocket. She told The Cut what happened next: "He was like, “You’re funny as fuck, and your internet presence is very strange. Send me something of yours.”" That little exchange led to Wolk playing Crystal, one of Ivan's friends who works in a candy shop and accompanies him and Anora on a very lavish trip to Las Vegas, among other things.
Her other on-screen credits are just as impressive
The first came in 2020, with a role in the comedy series Everything's Gonna Be Okay. After that she landed a small role in Judd Apatow's 2022 film, The Bubble, followed by her breakout in Anora. Next, she played opposite Romy Mars in the comedy series English Teacher, and has since had roles in Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, and Jonah Hill's Outcome.
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She's been on the internet since she was 13
Her first TikTok account, @fathoodbitch, amassed 200,000 followers in just a few months. But it coincided with her role in Everything's Gonna Be Okay, and executives on the series asked her to deactivate it. She returned to the platform in secret in 2020, with the account @livesinasociety. Around the same time, the internet began to unearth old tweet's of hers, with Wolk describing herself to Variety as "a very early cancelled person." She explained, "Like, to be cancelled in a real way, to lose opportunities because of what I was saying — and I was still making these videos, being fucking defiant even though people hated my guts and were tearing me apart.”
She also has a Substack
It seems like a natural evolution for Wolk, who now posts her musings to over 21 thousand followers on the platform. As her bio explains, she writes about "impotence, death, fantasy, and celebrity." Niche.
