Alden Ehrenreich, star of Oppenheimer and Solo: A Star Wars Story, tells all on life after Solo, losing out on great roles, and building a career his own way, in a new interview with Vanity Fair.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
Read the interview in full here, and let’s hope we see Ehrenreich reprise the role of Han Solo in the Lando series/film and/or Solo 2.
