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Meet the Actor Playing Young Dr. Oliver Wolf on Brilliant Minds
Who could blame young Oliver Wolf for not wanting to dissect a frog?
Casting a younger version of your series' star is always going to prove challenging. But with Brilliant Minds' focus on Dr. Oliver Wolf's (Zachary Quinto) life and out-of-the-box treatment methods, we'll inevitably get flashbacks to his younger self. That was the case in Episode 2, when we first meet grade school-age Oliver Wolf.
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But who's portraying a young Quinto in the new series? Here's what you need to know about young Dr. Oliver Wolf actor Jaden Myles Waldman.
What else has Jaden Myles Waldman starred in?
We'll undoubtedly see more of young Oliver's journey throughout the season, which means we might be seeing more of Waldman. Here's what you should know about the young actor.
Like several other cast members in Brilliant Minds — including Quinto and Donna Murphy — Waldman is a stage actor, having made his big stage debut in 2021 (after a pandemic-era delay) in Caroline, or Change. But he's not just drawn to the stage. Like his NBC co-stars, Waldman has also done a mix of onscreen and voice roles before Brilliant Minds, including in Ne Zha, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Plot Against America, Give or Take, Confetti, and as Peter Pinkerton in Pinkalicious & Peterrific.
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He's perhaps best known for his voice role as TO-B1 in the Emmy-nominated Star Wars: Visions and as Kun in the Oscar and Golden Globe-nominated movie Mirai.
Dr. Wolf took "do no harm" seriously from an early age
In the episode, our current timeline-aged Wolf wanders into a memory of his younger self walking into a science classroom and immediately feeling isolated from his peers due to his prosopagnosia (aka face blindness). He’s told by an impatient teacher to sit next to a certain student, but because he can’t tell anyone apart, he chooses the wrong seat. With his peers laughing at his expense, he eventually finds the right seat and is instructed to “euthanize” a frog so he can dissect it.
But rather than follow his teacher’s instructions, Oliver takes the glass jar with the still-living frog inside and runs out of the classroom to save the frog’s life.
Given what we know about Wolf’s uneasy relationship with his mother, Dr. Muriel Landon (Donna Murphy), in the present, audiences might have expected her to not take Oliver’s classroom exit too well. But the opposite is true.
“You’re not in trouble, honey,” Muriel tells Oliver when he explains that he didn’t want to kill the frog. He wants to be a doctor and is already taking the “do no harm” part of the Hippocratic Oath to heart.
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So, instead of punishing him, Muriel — in a wild parenting moment — takes her son to the morgue, where she allows him to dissect a cadaver instead of a frog. The reasoning being that the person on the table is already dead, and chose to donate their body to science. Now, Oliver can learn to dissect “the proper way.”
To see more of Waldman's spot-on performance as a young Oliver Wolf, watch new episodes of Brilliant Minds when they premiere on Mondays on NBC at 10/9c. Episodes are available to stream on Peacock the next day.
