Alden Ehrenreich Has Been to Space and Back
Three years ago, Alden Ehrenreich did a very weird thing. He flew to Europe in the middle of winter to film a space movie. He dressed up as a space cowboy and hung out with a seven-foot-tall dog who wears a bandolier and communicates via guttural vocal fry. Alden, as this space cowboy, said things like parsec and thermal detonator and coaxium and wailed WOO-HOO.
It was 2015 when Ehrenreich first auditioned for the role of space cowboy, who is a younger version of one of the most popular sci-fi characters of all time. Ehrenreich was 25 years old— a rising star who had already worked with the Coen Brothers, Coppola, Beatty, all that. Then, after the global release, the press junkets, the masses of fans—Ehrenreich went away. He was 28 when he returned home to Los Angeles after three years in space with his fluffy dog friend.
Now, he’s making his big return: Starring in a TV adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which will headline Peacock, NBC’s new streaming service, when it launches on July 15. It’ll be the first time most people have seen Ehrenreich in the two years since he’s reentered orbit. Or heard from him at all, really. By taking the space cowboy role, and joining the iconic film franchise that made the role famous, he’d elevated himself to a new tier of stardom. So what has he been doing since then, and why did he stay relatively quiet after such a big film?
When Ehrenreich calls me in early July to talk about Brave New World, this space movie he did a few years ago feels like the massive alien slug in the room. Neither of us wants to say its name out loud. It hangs over the conversation, as awkward questions about space movies tend to do, but eventually—he says he never does this— Ehrenreich brings it up first.
The call comes from his phone, actually. That’s weird. At least that’s what the caller ID says. ALDEN EHRENREIC, the H missing. Someday, you think, you’ll *69 and try to tell him in guttural dog moans that he should’ve used a different number.
The official mood from quarantine in Los Angeles: “I’m good… I’m good.”
Just so you don’t read him in stoned McConaughey voice: Ehrenreich was on Esquire’s cover in 2018, on the precipice of the space movie, where he’s revealed via a bowling outing as a smart, thoughtful, genuine dude, who plucks from a Criterion-level bank of film references in conversation. (Today: Jimmy Stewart, Mr Smith Goes to Washington.) It all checks out. He says gee-whiz earnestly. (Only the pure-hearted say gee-whiz.) But there’s a little more to it. Ehrenreich is so even-keeled that he’d make you feel like your resting mood is too much. Preternaturally calm, confident, earnest, no affect. His preference for flip phones over smartphones has been profile fodder for years and it shows. He’s here. Ehrenreich's absolute destroyer of a quarantine mustache is there, too, though he fails to mention this important development. It’s a fuzzy turnstyle for the passage of pandemic-life insights—this afternoon, Ehrenreich is thinking about what kind of people we’ll be when life isn’t lived six feet apart again.
"You know, the kind of work routine or rhythm that we live with is something that just snowballed as the Internet got more and more intwined in our lives," he says. "And I think maybe it's a good opportunity, and it's felt that way for me too, to check back in and to take a kind of sabbatical. Hopefully when we come back to whatever normal looks like, it's with a little more consideration."
Of course, there's really not much to do during a pandemic besides pontificate on pandemic life. Though Ehrenreich is in pre-production on a short film he wrote and will direct, about a guy who has a famous brother—and plans to sell his personal information to the paparazzi. Otherwise, Ehrenreich has a standing game night with friends, takes long walks, watches a couple movies a week to discuss with his film club. On the night of July 4, he was driving around with a friend in the West Adams area, when he saw parade-level fireworks rocketing from what looked to be, wow, suburban streets. “We were gonna drive to some kind of view to overlook it, but then it was like, well why not just be inside of it?” he says.
Screaming and whistling, neon booms, families watching from their porches, Alden and his friend, under it all. Going outside feels different now; it’s what brings him to the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington quote.
"Have you ever noticed how grateful you are to see daylight again after coming through a long, dark tunnel?"
Oh, shit. He's climbing. Ehrenreich is filming a scene set in Brave New World's cringetopia, and he’s climbing because he’s being chased. There’s a whole bunch of naked people and they want to fuck him. He doesn't want to fuck. But it’s an orgy that he’s just stumbled upon and there’s this pole. The pole probably seemed like the only escape at the time, so desperate was he not to fuck. Shimmying up now, scared as hell, some real kid-in-gym-class stuff. “GET AWAY FROM ME!” he screams at the poor naked people. It's a whole thing. At some point, running away from hoards of naked extras became a normal day on the Brave New World set.
“The most surreal part is when you get used to it, you know? You jump on set and there's a hundred naked people hanging out for 12 hours, and it's kind of like another day at the office,” Ehrenreich says. “All day, on top of that tower looking down and screaming to this whole group of nude people who are reaching for me and trying to lick me.”
Fellow high school burnouts and/or Catholic school kids: Brave New World is set in New London, 2540, where babies are engineered to fall within a specific social and working class. When they grow up, privacy isn’t a thing—the motto is “everything belongs to everybody,” hence the group sex—and they take a drug called soma to keep them smiley face. Meanwhile, America, or what used to be America, at least, is a bit wild west in comparison—the New Londoners see them as savages off the way things used to be. Monogamy, violence, greed, the sin of privacy.
Ehrenreich plays John the Savage (which, in 2020, reads more favorably than Huxley likely intended), who runs into one of those baby designers, Lenina Crowne, and a high-ranking New Londoner, Bernard Marx, in America. They bring him back to New London with them. Love triangle, revolution, big ideas, ensue, plus sex scenes that would detonate network censors and will surely see Brave New World taking the Horny Quarantine Show crown from Normal People. You can see why the story of a self-sedating, distraction-filled, open-sourced society is relevant in the age of doomscrolling and President Look-Over-There. Let alone, one that catches the eye of Ehrenreich, who's pretty self-aware about running an analog, social media-less ship to begin with.
Ehrenreich wasn't too long removed from the space movie when he ran into Leslie Feldman, Dreamworks’ casting head, at an Oscars party. She’s a family friend, the first person Ehrenreich ever really met in the entertainment industry. His career origins are a whole other story, involving Feldman, Stephen Spielberg, a bat mitzvah video, all leading to Ehrenreich’s first major acting part in 2009, a leading role in Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro. At the party, Feldman told Ehrenreich she was working on the Brave New World adaptation. Ehrenreich had just been talking about Brave New World, actually; it felt like one of the last novels from the dystopian sci-fi library in need of a 21st Century adaptation. So, in the summer of 2019, Alden the Savage showed up in the Welsh forest to throw down at a dystopian sex rave.
“I just liked that there was so much depth and complication,” he says about John. “That he was difficult and not necessarily a good guy or a bad guy. I think that's great value of the show is that all of it lives in the most intense shade of gray. Fuck. I just said shade of gray.”
(Too much sex talk.)
Alden Ehrenreich, noted nice person, gave a mustache’s worth of compliments to the rest of the cast. What Ehrenreich won’t say, we know this by now, is that Brave New World just might be the best showcase of his talent yet. The show’s nine episodes see him funneling nearly every performance of his career into John the Savage. The humor he found in playing Hobie Doyle, the lovable rancher-turned-Hollywood-star, in the Coen Brothers-directed Hail Caesar. That 0-60mph anger from 2017’s The Yellow Birds ("Gee whiz! You saw that?"), where he played a young soldier stationed in Iraq. Assorted roles that required a certain amount of romance-lead dreaminess: 2013’s Beautiful Creatures, 2016’s Rules Don’t Apply, and, of course, the big space movie. Charisma, too, most recently seen in Alden Ehrenreich, real-life person.
“Something I thought of at some point was like: [John] serves a little bit of the function that Han Solo serves, which is that he's the human being who goes, “What the fuck is all this shit?”
He laughs. We haven’t talked about the space movie yet. Star Wars. Han Solo. Alden Ehrenreich was Han Solo in a Star Wars movie. (Legal name: Solo: A Star Wars Story.) Ehrenreich shot first.
“It's the first time I've ever initiated that subject,” he tells me.
This is gonna make it seem like Alden doesn’t give a shit about Star Wars. He does though. Promise.
Just know: Being in a Star Wars film comes with a nearly unparalleled amount of public scrutiny from the press and fans. (Superhero movies are a close second.) When Kelly Marie Tran did it, she had to delete her Instagram, facing staggering discrimination and harassment. John Boyega was still fighting back against racist followers as recently as June. Rian Johnson is known by some as The Destroyer of Star Wars. JJ Abrams, too. A lot of people, actually. The attacks come from a small, but deafening crowd. The rest? They’re just passionate fans who enjoy themselves a good Star War or two.
But yeah, that makes for some major scrutiny about all things Star Wars. People like to talk. During production, there were rumors that the studio brought in an acting coach to help with Ehrenreich’s performance. (It turned out that the coach was brought in as a resource for the entire cast.) He had reportedly signed up for three other films; it’s looking increasingly unlikely that there will even be a sequel, the studio shifting its eye to TV shows.
Solo’s narrative soured early on, as the production fired its original directors and brought in Ron Howard to finish the film. The success of the film depends on who you ask. (Solo’s reviews were generally positive, but not holy-shit glowing.) Given how beloved Han Solo is in popular culture, no one was ever going to be totally happy with the way Alden woo-hooed. While he had plenty of supporters, it probably came down to this: His Star Wars movie didn't make as much money as the other Star Wars movies.
After everything, Ehrenreich took a break.
“I took some time off after Solo, just because it was basically a three-year experience from pre-production to the release of the movie,” he says. “And I just wanted to be a person, connect with people in my life, spend time and develop as a person outside of those worlds. And then you never know.”
This is when Alden’s whole coolheaded thing comes in handy. But it’s not indifference. Really, Ehrenreich probably cares more about his work than other famous people who had to swing big sparkle sticks at other famous people. Not many actors can say this with total honesty—it’s a borderline cliche, actually—but Ehrenreich has only taken roles in movies he genuinely wanted to be in. After Tetro, Ehrenreich didn't take another drop-everything gig until Rules Don't Apply four years later, to work with Warren Beatty. In the meantime, he just enjoyed college at NYU.
“I've been fortunate to almost always do movies that I actually really dug,” he says, including Solo. “You learn to stick to your guns and stick to what you care about. And it's an incredible opportunity to get excellent at tuning out what other people think, you know? That's the value on a personal level of being in the entertainment business, is that unless you get really good at that, it will drive you crazy.”
Cool. Let’s try to drive Alden Ehrenreich crazy then. You kind of have to.
If he’d ever reprise his role of Han Solo: “It depends on what it is. It depends on how it's done. It depends if it feels innate to the story.”
Has he seen The Rise of Skywalker, the hotly-debated conclusion of the original main Star Wars saga? (Big pause, likely consulting with mustache.) “... I didn’t.” Probably not the TV show, either. (“The Mandalorian, that’s what it’s called?”)
Has he heard anything about a potential Solo sequel? "No, I don't know anything about that. I mean, you know, I think our movie was kind of the last of the conventional-era Star Wars movie release time."
Just... any news through the Star Wars grapevine? "I've heard soooome stuff, but nothing concrete."
Sorry.
“No, it's okay. I had to like, dust off my old Star Wars answers.”
When you do something as weird as the very weird thing Alden Ehrenreich did, there's no finding yourself at the end of it all. That'd be a better story, really: Alden Ehrenreich Searches For Meaning After the Space Movie. Can't write that though. It's not him. The truth is, when Ehrenreich got back home and checked under that famous leather jacket for damages, he just saw himself, same as before.
"You know, there's no bullet holes, you’re fine, and everything's good," he says. "[You] see the kids respond to the movie and have that be a part of your life. It's very empowering to feel like, You know what you can do under those circumstances, if that makes sense. You know who you are."
Lately, Ehrenreich has been driving around Los Angeles, looking for a good space to start up something of an artists’ residence/production company. Start a community after this all ends. Lecture series, small theater productions, a place for talented people who don’t quite have a place in the system yet. Acting-wise, don’t expect a career swerve or anything, Ehrenreich taking a certain part to come off a certain way. Though he'd love to work with Scorsese, definitely go full circle with Spielberg, the man who powder-kegged his career, who wouldn’t. Otherwise, if he reads something, it’s exciting, and good people are involved, he’s in.
“If I say, Oh I really wanna go play a birthday clown, then someone comes along with some piece of shit birthday clown thing. I'll be like, Oh I guess let me go with this, which isn't my current career goal.”
Don’t ask, but Norman Snively, the villainous birthday clown from Air Bud, is the first birthday clown who comes to mind when Alden starts talking about birthday clowns. “Maybe the remake,” he says. “What are the other Air Bud movies? I used to know them…. It's like Air Bud: Golden Receiver. Football?” he asks. He's genuinely curious. This is a conversation now. “I mean, I shouldn't get too hair-splitting about how he could play volleyball. It's not like the soccer one is like, Oh, of course!”
Okay okay, sorry to bring it up, thoughts on post-pandemic Hollywood.
“I think right now, we're in this moment where we're figuring out what it looks like to shoot something,” he says. Ehrenreich stops. He’s been Googling. “Okay, Air Bud Spikes Back is the—with the Star Wars reference—it's... I'm assuming volleyball. Air Bud Seventh Inning Fetch. Air Bud World Pup is the soccer one. And Air Bud Golden Receiver. Okay, sorry. I needed to get that out of my system.”
Alden Ehrenreich: Nice person, space cowboy, Savage. Someday, rebooter of Air Bud.
“That, if anything—that's the real goal,” he says. “Where I see myself in 20 years, you know.”
Just wait till he hears that you shouldn’t fuck with Air Bud fans.
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