While preparing to play a prequelized Han Solo in the biggest film of his life, Alden Ehrenreich came across an interview from the late ’70s with Harrison Ford, following the release of the original Star Wars. Ford was asked what it felt like to come off of such a massive cultural hit and responded with relief that he didn’t feel much. Ehrenreich could relate. “We all live under this mythology that success in a certain way is salvational and changes everything,” the Solo star says now over Zoom. “The actual back end of success or failure ends up revealing itself to be not nearly as meaningful as you think on the front end. I’ve had that experience so many times. A movie comes out and you want to go like, ‘Yes!’—and you just don’t.”
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Ehrenreich thinks back to that Ford interview after I ask him a similar kind of question. In terms of his own career, 2023 has been major—and not just because it’s the first year in which he’s appeared in a film since 2018, when Solo flopped at the box office. Ehrenreich is the fiery colead of this past Sundance’s smash premiere, Fair Play, which launched to No. 1 on Netflix’s movies chart last month. He’s a key supporting figure in both Cocaine Bear, the hit B movie comedy from Elizabeth Banks, and Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-front-running epic that’s grossed close to $1 billion globally (with no signs of stopping). His directorial debut, the short film Shadow Brother Sunday, has played festivals and picked up prizes around the world, a concrete step forward in his filmmaking ambitions.
So, a natural inquiry: How does it all feel? No short way to answer that. For starters, SAG-AFTRA’s strike rules prevented Ehrenreich from talking about most of these projects as they were released. Their buzz existed on text threads with family and friends and in the occasional headline he’d failed to avoid. “It didn’t feel nearly as real,” he says. As we chat, he’s been allowed to publicly discuss the films for about 48 hours. Then there’s the broader reality. At just 33 years old, the young actor has already hit Hollywood highs and lows, been forced to learn the transitory nature of any level of standing in this industry. He wonders if he’s built for it at all. “You just try to navigate, as we all do, caring too much about what other people think of you, and you try to listen to something that’s more important,” he says. “It’s very, very hard to do.” Especially, perhaps, when the feedback is as good as it’s been lately.
Ehrenreich is big on quoting. Titans of Hollywood, like Harrison Ford, have articulated ways of surviving through showbusiness that he’s not only absorbed, but adopted as a kind of philosophy. “Are you ready for a pretentious reference?” he asks me knowingly, as he works through one of many long, candid answers. “I go back to an AFI speech that Orson Welles gave where he said, ‘Maybe my films would’ve been better, but they wouldn’t have been mine.’”
Before turning 20, Ehrenreich made his feature-acting debut in Francis Ford Coppola’s noir drama Tetro, and was promptly compared to a young Leonardo DiCaprio by Roger Ebert. He went on to work with Woody Allen, Park Chan-wook, and most auspiciously, the Coen brothers in their old-Hollywood pastiche Hail, Caesar! His deadpan tour-de-force there, as a Gene Autry-esque dimwit singing cowboy, drew raves, and his profile skyrocketed. The film was released in February of 2016. In March, reports surfaced that Ehrenreich had been shortlisted to play Han Solo in the mega-budgeted eponymous prequel to be directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller; his casting was confirmed by May. After the film’s box office disappointment—relative to its $275-plus million budget anyway, as it grossed nearly $400 million worldwide—the actor took time off, given the process’s length from pre-production prep to post-release promotion. (One reason it took so long: Lord and Miller were replaced by Ron Howard mid-shoot.) More recently, he’s reflected on what that time gave him.
“I loved the original spirit of how they wanted to make [Solo], and I did it because it was this great platform from which I could do my own thing,” he says. “But what I realized at that point is: I hadn’t built my own thing enough to be able to do it…. I knew that I didn’t know myself in that way yet, and that takes a certain amount of time and effort and failure in its own kind of enclosed way. That’s what I spent that time doing.”
He ended his post-Solo hiatus with a role on the ill-fated Peaco*ck series Brave New World, which was in production for eight months. Covid hit immediately thereafter. Suddenly, as the world emerged out of the pandemic, Ehrenreich found himself no longer shortlisted for the most plum roles available to actors his age. “When you go back and want to do something, you realize that there’s other people on the list who have surpassed you, and you have to fight harder for a particular role that you want,” he says. “I’ve lived that over and over again.”
But Ehrenreich quotes that Welles speech to affirm that he stands by his choices and his selectiveness. “There’s a practical arithmetic as an actor now that, frankly, I just don’t have the stomach for in the long run,” he says. “I don’t want to do projects on the cut. I don’t want to do things I don’t really love if I can avoid it—and with the cadence now, you kind of have to be doing a certain amount of projects.” Case in point: “There are things that I really wanted that I didn’t get. The heartbreaker is when the director goes, ‘You’re who I want, but I can’t cast you because they need to have this guy who came off this thing.’”
This makes Ehrenreich’s 2023 work stand out all the more. One could argue he’s conformed to the expectation of a hustling rising star. He does not see it that way: “When I hear people say, ‘God, you weren’t in a movie for five years,’ I’m like, ‘Holy sh*t!’” He made Cocaine Bear to ease back into the routine and had a blast. A few months later, he flew to Serbia to star with Phoebe Dynevor in the taut thriller Fair Play, about an engaged couple working at the same financial firm whose bond unravels when one is promoted over the other. Ehrenreich’s performance in this blazing feature debut from Chloe Domont, which Netflix bought out of Sundance for $20 million, is dark and explosive, in a key he hadn’t hit before. What pushed him to take such a risky, volatile approach? “You have to trust the filmmaker. You live and die on them—and if you’re going to die, you’re already dead at that point.”
