![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/50dc312e8aa44380464c5799990c66b75e-Alden-Ehrenreich-lede.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Corey Nickols\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
When Alden Ehrenreich visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with his mother as a kid, she encouraged him to play a game where they\u2019d walk around a gallery saying which pieces they hated. \u201cIt was a very smart trick,\u201d he tells me, because he\u2019d start by naming the works he, as a sullen preteen, found stupid or boring, and then, by process of elimination, arrive at the pieces he liked. \u201cThen she\u2019d go, \u2018Why do you like it?\u2019\u201d Ehrenreich says. Suddenly, he had to learn to\u00a0express why he was into art.<\/p>\n
The actor, moderately incognito in jeans, a baseball cap with the insignia of the Explorer\u2019s Club, and a slim wristwatch, is walking me through his cultural education as we wander around the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side, which occupies a crucial spot in that history. He grew up in the Pacific Palisades, near the coast of Los Angeles, where his mother worked as an interior designer and his father as an accountant, but he remembers visiting the gallery\u2019s small but very striking collection of Vienna-adjacent artists on a trip to New York when he was 13. \u201cIt was an epiphanic thing,\u201d Ehrenreich says. Ehrenreich\u2019s family is Jewish and had a background in Germany and Austria, but he hadn\u2019t thought deeply about that history and got fascinated by it. He bought books from the gallery\u2019s bookstore \u2014 when we wrap up our interview later, he says he\u2019s going to buy some more. \u201cI looked at all this stuff and thought, There\u2019s something about this I love.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve seen Ehrenreich on film, or in his talk-of-the-spring stage turn in the comedy Becky Shaw on Broadway, you might be familiar with his perpetually furrowed brow, or his offhand, often deadpan sense of humor. At 36, he\u2019s got a shock of curly hair, the clear skin of a movie star, and the careful manner of someone who\u2019s seen a lot in his time in the industry. Most notably, he played Han Solo in a Star Wars prequel; the film, released in 2018, had a tortured production process, tepid reception, and no sequels. Ehrenreich has since pursued a lower-profile career, though a fulfilling one, with memorable supporting performances in films like Oppenheimer, as a skeptical aide, and Weapons, as a mustachioed cop. As we tour a room of drawings by Egon Schiele, with twisted, expressive bodies in ruddy hues, he notices a plaster death mask of the artist\u2019s pinched face. \u201cI\u2019m so glad we don\u2019t do that anymore,\u201d he says, then laughs. \u201cThe closest thing we have now is when you get your face cast for a Marvel TV show.\u201d He knows from experience, having acted in Disney+\u2019s Ironheart. \u201cThey cover you in a mold,\u201d he remembers. \u201cSome people freak out.\u201d<\/p>\n
The concept of a Marvel death mask is an observation that might appeal to Max, the brutal finance guy that Ehrenreich is currently playing in Becky Shaw, where he\u2019s landing whoppers of cynical dialogue to shock and acclaim. \u201cLove is a happy byproduct of use,\u201d goes a typical Max line. Or, more pointedly, \u201cI would like you to try harder the next time you attempt suicide.\u201d Gina Gionfriddo\u2019s play presents a quartet of intermeshed young people: Max is the adoptive brother of the similarly blunt Suzanna (Lauren Patten), whose proto-hipster boyfriend (Patrick Ball of The Pitt) suggests setting Max up on a date with the titular Becky (Madeline Brewer, of The Handmaids Tale), who presents as a babe-in-the-woods type but has her own grasping ambitions. Their date goes horribly wrong. (The production also sports an icy and delicious soup\u00e7on of Linda Emond as Suzanna\u2019s mother.) Becky Shaw was well-received when first performed and a Pulitzer finalist in 2009, but this spring\u2019s blistering revival, directed by Trip Cullman, benefits from the way it thrusts Gionfriddo\u2019s end-of-the-aughts frankness in front of a more buttoned-up 2020s theatergoing audience, like a cannonball into a swimming pool. The production also benefits from the fact that it\u2019s introducing Ehrenreich\u2019s impressive talents as a stage actor to New York at a time when theatergoers have been looking for a jolt of energy. He plays Max\u2019s meanness to a hilt while weaving together an understanding of his wounded past, a \u201csuperb\u201d performance in which, as Sara Holdren wrote<\/a> on Vulture, he is \u201cas unafraid to be horrid as he eventually is to be broken.\u201d In the New York Times<\/a>,\u00a0Laura Collins-Hughes called Ehrenreich\u2019s work \u201ca show-stealing Broadway debut.\u201d People can be skeptical when screen stars parachute into plays around Tony season to burnish their reputations. A sentiment I\u2019ve heard several times over in the last few weeks has run along the lines of, Alden Ehrenreich, who knew? And, How have they been hiding this guy from us in California?<\/p>\n \n \u201cThere are nights where I am very much the bad guy, and then there are nights where they\u2019re very much on my side.\u201d Ehrenreich hasn\u2019t read his own rave reviews, and as we sit down for a lunch at the Neue Galerie\u2019s Caf\u00e9 Sabarsky, admits to being a little weirded out by the experience of having to do press for a thing he\u2019s still performing in. Usually, you\u2019ve wrapped a film by the time you\u2019re doing an interview; you don\u2019t have to talk about it and then go onstage a day later. But he is very much enjoying the experience of getting direct feedback from his audiences. Audiences tend to shift their allegiances between the characters in Becky Shaw every show, which keeps the ensemble on their toes \u2014 they like to talk about whether Max or Becky is more in favor each night backstage. In the performance the day before we met, Ehrenreich was coasting along with a rowdy, fun-loving audience that was laughing alongside Max, up to the point where he delivers a line about how Becky \u201clooks like a cupcake\u201d in a bright-pink dress. A lone voice responded to that joke with a forcible, \u201cJesus Christ.\u201d Ehrenreich felt the tide turn against him. Everyone in the theater clammed up, as if embarrassed to have endorsed Max with laughter. \u201cScientists could do interesting studies on this,\u201d he says. \u201cThere are nights where I am very much the bad guy, and then there are nights where they\u2019re very much on my side.\u201d<\/p>\n Ehrenreich can talk for long paragraphs about the strange dynamics of performer and audience, which he does, pausing to order a pea soup. Then, after seeing our waiter deliver my order of bratwurst, he realizes he would prefer to have bratwurst too. (\u201cI\u2019ll have what she\u2019s having, basically,\u201d he tells the waiter.) He\u2019s always had an affinity for theater, he explains, without the professional credits. He spent three years at NYU studying acting, where he founded a theater group with some fellow students. And mid-pandemic, in 2021, he bought a former trolley station near the intersection of the 110 and the 5 freeways in L.A. that he\u2019s been working on turning into a nonprofit theater, dubbed the Huron Station Playhouse. They\u2019re running acting classes and development circles for playwrights \u2014 if this sounds like a lark, he has legit names involved, like the playwrights Clare Barron and Agnes Borinsky \u2014 and plans to start producing two productions a year. Ehrenreich\u2019s goal is for it to be a place for people who might\u2019ve felt themselves making compromises in their art to get ahead in the film industry to be \u201ctotally insulated from thinking about the business,\u201d he says, \u201cand to try to make better shit, frankly.\u201d In a neat coincidence, Ehrenreich had just spotted and said hi to the actress Alia Shawkat, currently starring in Barron\u2019s play You Got Older downtown, across the room at Caf\u00e9 Sabarsky. She was having her own lunch on a day off for the theater. She\u2019d also done a reading at Huron Station.<\/p>\n As Ehrenreich discusses the dangers of \u201cinternalized commercial corporate thinking,\u201d it\u2019s fair to ask if he sees it in his own decisions earlier in his career. \u201cI have never done a movie just for that reason,\u201d he insists, and that even in his work with a more commercial bent, there was always a character he cared deeply about. \u201cBut I definitely feel that pressure, and it\u2019s probably kept me from taking the time to do other things,\u201d he says. \u201cRight now, I\u2019m only working on things that I\u2019m really interested in.\u201d After rising to the top of a much dissected short list of actors up to play a young Han Solo at the end of the 2010s, he agonized over whether he wanted to take that job, and \u201cbecause of the way they approached the character in the material I\u2019d done up to that point, I was like, I love this guy and I do want to do it.\u201d In the process of making Solo, the film\u2019s original directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, were fired and replaced with Ron Howard. In an interview<\/a> published this January, Kathleen Kennedy, the departing head of the Star Wars studio Lucasfilm, insisted she had no regrets about her tenure, except for a \u201cbit of regret\u201d about Solo, because she had come to realize you couldn\u2019t replace Harrison Ford in the eyes of an audience. In casting Ehrenreich, Kennedy said, \u201cWe put him in an impossible situation.\u201d Did Ehrenreich feel that he was in an impossible situation? He makes a pained, squinting expression and takes a deep breath. \u201cThis is a world where I have to be very smart about what I say,\u201d he says, collecting himself. \u201cI don\u2019t have the same point of view on that. I see that differently.\u201d<\/p>\n Before Solo, Ehrenreich had already assembled an impressive and famously charmed Hollywood career, aided by a series of bold-faced auteur mentors, which may help explain his even keel amid the buffets of fame and scrutiny. He was first noticed as a teen by Steven Spielberg via a comedy video he\u2019d made for a friend\u2019s bar mitzvah. That led to an agent, which led, right at the end of high school, to a role in Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s film Tetro. (Coppola had his actors rehearse more than any other director Ehrenreich\u2019s worked with; he compares that process to a play.) He spent five years, between ages 19 and 24, meeting with Warren Beatty as the actor and director developed his 2016 film Rules Don\u2019t Apply and regaled Ehrenreich with stories over dinner about legends like No\u00ebl Coward and Lillian Hellman. He gave a breakout performance in the Coen brothers\u2019 Old Hollywood fantasia Hail, Caesar!, also released in 2016, as an oblivious Roy Rogers\u2013esque singing cowboy, forced by his studio into starring in a drawing-room comedy. (In the film\u2019s funniest scene, he keeps stumbling on the line \u201cWould that it were so simple\u201d while an effete and increasingly angry director played by Ralph Fiennes tries to coach him.) For the role, he took riding lessons and learned to do rope tricks and twirl a gun. It fulfilled the kinds of fantasies he\u2019d had when, as a kid, his parents showed him classic films. Being in Hail, Caesar!, he says, \u201cwas what I thought Hollywood was going to be growing up.\u201d<\/p>\n Ehrenreich talks about Hollywood, and acting in general, with a combination of earned nostalgia \u2014 he really did learn from some of our master filmmakers \u2014 and seasoned weariness. He greatly admires people like John Cassavetes, who led his own theater company in L.A. in the 1980s; loves reading biographies of famous artists, having just finished one on John Steinbeck; and studiously avoids the internet, preferring to carry around a giant flip phone. He had to get a smartphone briefly, because it was helpful in renovating his theater, but lost it and decided not to replace it. He\u2019s aware this paints an image of himself as a stuffy elder millennial, but he\u2019s stalwart in his tastes and convictions. He\u2019s excited to read Ben Lerner<\/a>\u2019s Transcription, he says when we end up discussing literature, and thinks the humor in Leaving the Atocha Station was underdiscussed, adding sheepishly that Infinite Jest was really funny too. Talking about the pressure to commodify yourself for a career, he wonders whether he\u2019s experiencing the same forces that have existed on artists for millennia, or whether there\u2019s something especially pronounced in a moment of mass consolidation and technological overreach. Maybe this is also the experience of being in your 30s. \u201cI don\u2019t know, probably both,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n After Becky Shaw, Ehrenreich has cleared time for himself this summer to work on his draft of a feature screenplay. He made a short film in 2023 and really wants to direct more \u2014 \u201cCertainly not the first actor to say that,\u201d he deadpans. If he cloaks some of his earnestness in dry humor, the underlying thrust of it is still palpable. \u201cI had the best film school in the world working with these people,\u201d he says, \u201cand I just want to take their ideas and methods and take it as far as I can in my own voice.\u201d It\u2019s not too far from the energy of Max, who \u2014 you realize in Becky Shaw\u2019s second act \u2014 cares deeply in his own weird way about trying to protect and pay back the family that took him in. And it\u2019s also the experience of a kid who, walking through a gallery, has worked through what he doesn\u2019t like until he\u2019s realized there is some art he\u2019s in love with. The most caustic people in the world often have the softest underbellies \u2014 at least if Alden Ehrenreich is playing them. \u201cWe just have to believe in some kind of something,\u201d he tells me, midway through describing the anxiety that is palpable in Los Angeles right now, facing a conflux of crises including industry contraction and recovery from last year\u2019s wildfires. The line starts to sound like a personal mantra. \u201cWe just have to believe in the possibility of some kind of renewal.\u201d<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo: Corey Nickols\/Getty Images When Alden Ehrenreich visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with his mother…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":460094,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[268],"tags":[202473,202472,434,18,53123,117,19,17,327,11943,16007,16008,819],"class_list":{"0":"post-460093","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-alden-ehrenreich","9":"tag-becky-shaw","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-encounter","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-movies","17":"tag-theater","18":"tag-vulture-homepage-lede","19":"tag-vulture-section-lede","20":"tag-weapons"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/57ae1267231aecdd622252300c3cca2d70-Alden-Ehrenreich-Marc-J-Franklin.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Marc J. Franklin\n <\/p>\n