Started a little theater collective with some friends, just so he’d have a venue in which to act and direct. It’s really insane, it is, and every time I tell this story it still seems so surreal. “The outlaw thing is an act. There’s a Sizzler across the street,” he says, with the air of someone who is not unfamiliar with the Sizzler across the street. “He said, ‘It’s a bit like Wile E. Coyote—you run off the cliff, and you don’t even realize you’re off the cliff until you look down.’, “And this”—shooting Tetro with Coppola in Buenos Aires, he means—“was before I looked down. That’s usually an indication that that’s the person to cast. I suggest to Ehrenreich that Tetro is the sort of experience that could spoil you for a lot of the other kinds of work a working actor has to do. See a recent post on Tumblr from @cinemagal about g:-alden-ehrenreich. “That’s bullshit,” Ehrenreich says. I’m having such a good day. Photography Aigner Allure Architectural Digest Carolina Herrera VIP 212 Details Dior Elle France Elle US Entertainment Weekly Esquire Esquire UK Flair Glamour GQ GQ Germany GQ Japan GQ UK GQ UK Style H&M Harper's Bazaar Arabia Harper's Bazaar China Harper's Bazaar UK Harper's Bazaar US. He knows he can play the 'Star Wars' icon his way. “He wanted to know everything about New York in the sixties and seventies. A few days’ growth of beard softens his absurdly sharp jawline, knocks down the overall movie-star wattage of his resting face. “Because I don’t think he’s the kind of person who’s just going to go in to work and collect the check and go home.”, After Tetro, Ehrenreich went to NYU for almost four years. Ehrenreich had left NYU—he remains a few credits shy of a degree—and returned to L. A. to get back to acting. So you’re really kept out of all the backroom dynamics of what was going on.”, It’s kind of in the DNA of something this enormous to be a bit of a challenge.”, He wasn’t told that Lord and Miller were being replaced until it happened, he says. really exciting game in town for me at that time. “When they’re translated into what I do now.”. Regarding Han Solo, he will only quote what the original nerf herder himself advised him to say: “Tell them that I told you everything that you needed to know, and that you’re not allowed to tell anyone.”. He was born in 1989, which technically makes him part of the Prequels Generation. There were rumors about poor time management, runaway improv, a let’s-find-it-in-the- edit approach you can’t get away with when your film is also a moving part in the machinery of a multibillion-dollar Disney franchise. But—yeah.” Anyway: Between auditions for Solo, Ehrenreich took a trip out to Death Valley. Adoring Alden Ehrenreich — Alden Ehrenreich photo shoot for Esquire magazine... 1.5M ratings 277k ratings See, that’s what the app is perfect for. Ehrenreich got an agent based on that conversation. And”—he laughs—“that’s about it...In a way, walking a tightrope that’s a lot higher is a great way to learn that lesson more profoundly.”, This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. . What if they get somebody that has a totally different vision?” Ehrenreich admits. Mar 10, 2019 - "Solo: A Star Wars Story" star Alden Ehrenreich covers the May 2018 issue of Esquire magazine photographed by Alexi Lubomirski. He brought an autograph book, expecting celebrities; the only one who showed up was Shaquille O’Neal, which for Ehrenreich, a Lakers fan, was a big deal. Those were all people Warren knew.”. Imagine: One day you’re in high school. That’s been the most fun thing—watching these movies growing up and then getting to say, like, Why’d you do this? Button-down western-cut shirt, windbreaker, utilitarian black hiking boots. Brave New World stars Alden Ehrenreich, ... For the first time, the actor tells Esquire about Phil Lord and Chris Miller's exits. It starts out with the cusp’ing, with the usual revelations of an up-and-comer no one knows yet. Warren would say, We’re gonna go now, and then that day would come and go. Article from esquire.com. Just decided you need a break? You don’t wanna get there and go, God, maybe I just did this because my agent told me to.” He knows what he’s getting into. Since we last talked, the Oscars happened. But it may be a) background scenes for his Dior ad with Natalie Portman or b) from the 2009 movie Tetro. “Either they impressed you well or they impressed you badly, but you can’t get them out of your head. And she said this thing that he really liked, and that I really liked, which is that the main value for her was access. Alden Ehrenreich plays Han Solo in SOLO: A Star Wars Story in theatres May 25, 2018. (Does anybody?) We tried a lot of different things, rethinking behind the scenes,” he says. He says he doesn’t remember ever jumping off furniture pretending to be Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn. “From the first screen test on, we played around with it a lot. Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites. “Three,” he says, then flinches, understanding he may have just created a disturbance in the Force. Because I spent a lot of time with them, and we had a really good relationship—they also cast me. What he can't predict is what will happen once he’s done that. People tend not to when he drops by here, sometimes late at night, to shoot some pool or just observe the “real cross section of humanity” one sees in a bowling alley that stays open until three in the morning. “I thought it was just a prank call. But he and Gianni knew this girl who was friends with one of Gianni’s cousins. “They’d be in the audience of some little rat-hole theater,” he says, “and then take me out to dinner after. But one way or another, he is writing himself into film history—for successfully reinventing a daunting pop-culture icon in his own image or for trying to do so and blowing it. “He seemed like a tough guy who was really scared.” According to Kennedy, he also aced a key challenge: a screen test with Chewbacca. #Solo A Star Wars Story #Han Solo #alden ehrenreich #emilia clarke #donald glover #star wars #photo set #ron howards #2010s #space #sci fi #action. This is early in our conversation, when we haven’t talked much about Star Wars yet, but suddenly it’s the bantha in the room. On the Internet, to which the actor has so carefully limited his access, the Why him? Starring Alden Ehrenreich, Jessica Brown Findlay, and Harry Lloyd, Brave New World is based on the novel by Aldous Huxley and showcases a new utopian society that has achieved peace and stability through the prohibition of monogamy, privacy, money, family, and history itself. We wanted someone who presented as a pirate but had a big heart underneath,” Lord tells me via email. SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY (2018) Dir. “One of the things I remember Warren Beatty saying,” he tells me, “is that he had a conversation with Jodie Foster once about what the actual value of fame is. He didn’t tell anyone he’d just shot a Francis Ford Coppola movie until Tetro came out. “I think he probably reads a book a day.”, “He’s a total sponge,” says Coppola, who cast Ehrenreich in 2009’s Tetro, the actor’s feature debut. Ehrenreich looks down with concern as my tape recorder starts to red-line. Howard—the two-time Oscar winner and card-carrying Friend of Lucasfilm—stepped in to direct Solo last July, after Lord and Miller were relieved of duty four months into production. From the looks of things, he’s found a more inside-out way to play the character: as a blustering rookie who already fronts like he’s the Han Solo but has yet to prove it to himself. He has a very deliberate, slow process.”. He knew how to navigate a tricky situation, and almost from the first or second day everybody pretty quickly recharged and got excited again about the movie.” (Lord and Miller ended up with executive-producer credits on the film. And not just any character—Han Solo, the closest thing Star Wars has to Bogart or Wolverine, the template for forty years’ worth of wisecracking- badass pop-culture icons, from Mal Reynolds on Joss Whedon’s cult series Firefly to Chris Pratt’s Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy. “One of the beautiful things about being a part of Star Wars is that it’s one of those few things that are community- building in that way. I ask him what it’s like to know that there will be a Han Solo figure out there with his face on it, that he’s now part of a franchise that will outlive him. And then I’d realize, Oh—it’s because I’m not checking my email nineteen thousand times.”, When he has the means to do that, Ehrenreich says, “I’m less able to be where I am, a little bit.”. Most of it involved him asking Beatty questions, he adds. And I didn’t really give a rat’s ass who got my sword.”, Ehrenreich confesses that he was intimidated sitting down with Ford because “you never know what to expect from people. In 1999, Ehrenreich got to attend an advance screening of Episode I: The Phantom Menace. The things we need. “And you can control how you treat people. Ron Howard. “There’s other places we can go. This is Star Wars. Ehrenreich knows he can’t spend his entire career “frolicking in that world of film from the past,” that at some point, having apprenticed in a bubble where it’s still the seventies, he needs to figure out how to do the work the way the work is done, here in 2018. See more ideas about alden ehrenreich, alden, celebrities male. As a professional, he’s gotten the chance to work with two actors—George Clooney in Hail, Caesar! In the end, Ehrenreich may be the best person for this job because he already sees it that way. From Esquire. . He was just kind of like, ‘Hey, what’s up, kid?’ My impression is that when he did Force Awakens he was surprised at what a good time he had, and how meaningful it ended up feeling to him.”, Not that they talked about that, of course. “Like as much as it’s”—and here he pauses and leaves a space, as if the various things that “it” represents were too huge and too obvious to name with actual words—“it’s also a decision you want to make sure you’re making of your own volition, and not just because everyone would think you’re insane if you didn’t. This isn’t that. The questions it might have prompted Ehrenreich to ask himself, while waiting for word on who would be directing the rest of his movie, were questions he’d asked himself already, during a trip he’d taken in the middle of the audition process. I did a movie about the Iraq War right before this, and there’s almost as much information about Star Wars.”, He delved into Wookieepedia, a fan- curated online reference source that’s exactly what it sounds like. We tried hard to identify where the following shirtless photos of our gorgeous actor is from but we haven’t got a clue — well at least we are not 100%. “You can control your decision to say yes, and you can control your own work, the work you put into it,” he says. May 14, 2018 - The “young Cary Grant” was a scene-stealer in the Coen Brothers’ Hail Ceasar!, but now he’s ready to be the leading man. “It’s not an ensemble war movie,” Howard says, “which is traditionally what they’ve been. Like, ‘This is what’s happening.’ That’s not what they said to me, but that was the vibe I got.”, Ehrenreich says the fan-press rumor that it was he who approached Kennedy with concerns about Lord and Miller is “not at all” true, that he couldn’t imagine ever making a call like that “unless people were being put in danger or something.”. This is Star Wars. Yet most of that work happened in films seen by few moviegoers and—probably—even fewer hardcore Star Wars fans. Even Ford couldn’t quit after just one. It’s only later that I realize he never quite told me why he made the decision. “I had an iPhone,” he says, “and then I’d forget my iPhone at home, and I’d be like, God, I feel so good. “The outlaw thing is an act. On a personal level, it felt emotional, for them to be going after we’d set out on that course together. Maybe that way of putting it is a little self-important. Alden Ehrenreich is ready for his close-up as he covers the May 2018 issue of Esquire. Operated by ITP Media Group of PO Box 500024 Dubai UAE by Permission of Hearst Communications, Inc., New York, New York, United States of America, And we don't have to be worried after all. A generation of kids will grow up with Ehrenreich as their idea of Han Solo, which, per Lester Bangs, is basically like being Elvis to a bunch of five-year-olds. His mother is an interior designer who loves movies. When we meet, it’s March and nobody’s seen anything of Solo but the trailers. Over iced tea and burrata—it’s the middle of the afternoon, so neither of us can decide which meal we’re supposed to be having—I ask him how his Oscar night went. Photographed by Alexi Lubomirski, Ehrenreich plays it rugged in an outdoors photo shoot. “At the end of it, Bangs is like, ‘We’re not gonna ever have this again, so instead of saying goodbye to Elvis, I’ll say goodbye to you,’ ” Ehrenreich says. “R2-D2’s falling apart, and they come back from the desert with, like, a quarter of what they needed to shoot. “An impression of Harrison Ford would have felt like an extended Saturday Night Live sketch,” Miller adds. He divulged to Esquire in April that he's signed on for "three" Star Wars films in total. April 24, 2018. They had mentioned there were some disagreements before, but they didn’t get into it. Coppola says he saw half a dozen actors for the role. He mostly let his film career sit idle. Or that scene in Chaplin when he goes into the wardrobe and finds the costume. Physically, he’s enough of a Leonardo DiCaprio ringer to throw off facial- recognition software, and may have gotten the Han Solo role in part because Catch Me if You Can–era Leo wasn’t available. “I thought it was just a prank call. Make your own metaphor out of this, if you choose to. Of Lord and Miller, Ehrenreich says, “They had a different style than Ron in terms of the way we were working.” He’s not sure what their Solo would have been like. What he can't predict is what will happen once he’s done that. It’s a rough-and-tumble rite-of- passage story about a young guy defining himself, and yearning for autonomy and being tested as an individual with his own agency for the first time.” Of course, that second sentence makes Solo sound, in spite of its intentions, an awful lot like a Star Wars movie. Like, this really is Star Wars now.”. Log in Sign up. He also insists that the story about Lucasfilm forcing Lord and Miller to bring in an acting coach—later identified as writer- director Maggie Kiley—to work on his performance has been mischaracterized: “She was part of conversations that happened for a couple weeks at one point,” Ehrenreich says, “but that was basically it.” (Lord and Miller say that Kiley is someone they’d worked with on previous films and that they brought her on Solo as a resource for the entire cast as well as themselves.) And so it was with Alden—he had qualities that seemed to last with you.”. “He admitted that he was more forthcoming with me than he was with Alden, because he didn’t want to hamstring Alden,” says Howard, who spoke with Ford after taking over Solo. -Phil Lord. They’d show her their dumb movies and she’d laugh. And he was gracious and supportive and very welcoming—a real gentleman. He liked the script. Kathleen Kennedy, the head of Lucasfilm, says the number was a somewhat less extravagant sixteen hundred but agrees that Ehrenreich stood out from “his very first screen test.”, “Alden, remarkably, remained the person to beat from day one,” Miller says. “Because that’s the only way in which these lessons become of value,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s officially, uh, public. It marks the first time since the debut of the intergalactically maligned George Lucas prequels that we’ve been asked to accept a different actor playing a character introduced in A New Hope. The shoot itself is so immersive you don’t know if you’re on or off set, talking about art or acting in a movie about talking about art, waking or dreaming. I flash on something Coppola told me when we talked a few days earlier, when I asked him how he thought Ehrenreich would do as Han Solo, given the way these projects tend to take over an actor’s life. He can’t say whether they were really taking an Apatovian riffs-over-script approach. “I was still auditioning when I was in college,” he says, “but I wasn’t really giving it the old college try. “I think the first meeting I had with him was four hours,” Ehrenreich says. He’s exhibited the kind of versatile talent that’ll allow him to shuttle, James Franco–style, from drama to dumbass and back, which will also likely come in handy as he juggles the varied tonalities of the Star Wars franchise’s first quasi-comedy. “I’m in love with her, and I sing a song about her and she rejects me, and I cry and I eat dirt. Actor Alden Ehrenreich is taking on the mantle of Harrison Ford's signature smuggler, and original directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord have explained what helped him land the gig. Within seconds, even before we get a glimpse of Ehrenreich with a canon-appropriate seventies shag, driving a landspeeder like he stole it, the point has been made—whereas 2015’s The Force Awakens gave us Ford’s Solo as a dad, this movie is about Han as a dude. Promoting Solo: A Star Wars Story, Ehrenreich wears fashions from brands like Frame and Calvin Klein. Yes, Latin club. He likes the idea that everything the characters do in this film, every place they visit, will become part of the lexicon. But it is something we all have a connection to, something everybody knows about. “I was there to die. “I don’t know that I thought of it that way at all,” he said. “He felt classic and contemporary all at once,” says Lord. “I remember hearing this thing Orson Welles said about getting successful really young,” Ehrenreich continues. “The wardrobe is a big part,” he says. “I remember doing my audition on the Falcon, putting on the jeans with the Corellian bloodstripe”—per Wookieepedia, “an award for conspicuous gallantry given by the Corellian military forces”—“and thinking, Oh, yeah. Or on the phone at night—Ehrenreich got those calls Pauline Kael got, the Beatty seduction calls. And then Leslee Feldman called my mom. They didn’t meet, though, because—and this is the best part of the story— Ehrenreich wasn’t at the bat mitzvah. “It was this period of going, What if they get somebody that you don’t get along with? We may earn a commission from these links. All of that is about to change. Following supporting roles in the 2013 films Blue Jasmine and Stoker, he starred in the Coen brothers comedy Hail, Caesar! Alex Pappademas with Photos by Alexi Lubomirski. And then Leslee Feldman, who was the head of casting at DreamWorks, called my mom.”. For me, to get to be around these people whose work I’ve admired, and ask them really specific questions about that work, is kind of amazing. Alden Ehrenreich Addresses All the Han Solo Drama Rumors: Photo #4071525. Alden Ehrenreich gives a smoldering stare on the cover of Esquire's May 2018 issue, on newsstands May 1. Ford had unsuccessfully lobbied for Lucas to kill off Han Solo in Return of the Jedi. “It’s just like in life—you might go to a party or an event, but the next day one or two people just stick in your mind for some reason,” he says. April 24, 2018. “I go back to the documentaries I watched about the making of A New Hope,” Ehrenreich says. “He wasn’t saying that,” he says, “but you’d find out that he was meeting with everybody else, y’know?”. Alden Ehrenreich - Get the latest update about Alden Ehrenreich at Esquire Middle East ", “I remember these girls calling me and giggling and saying something about Spielberg being [at the party],” Ehrenreich says. “What you would do on YouTube now, basically.”. Ron Howard Will Step in to Direct Han Solo, Here's the Title of the New Han Solo Movie, 'Solo' Will Reveal How Han and Chewie Met. Instead, we find seats in a different corner of the bowling alley, across from a little coffee counter that looks like it’s been waiting undisturbed for its next customer since approximately 1964. cinemagal. We felt Alden did the same with Han Solo.”, The directors say that Ehrenreich was literally the first actor they saw for Han, though they confirm rumors that they went on to audition upwards of three thousand. Discover more posts about g:-alden-ehrenreich. Like when you watch La Vie en Rose or Walk the Line—you’re watching them become that thing. He knows he can play the 'Star Wars' icon his way. The director saw something in Ehrenreich that day—a willingness to go for it, for one thing. Transferred after a semester from Tisch to the university’s make-your-own-major Gallatin School. And although Ehrenreich sought his predecessor’s guidance at a top-secret meeting before filming began, he doesn’t seem to be doing a Ford impression here. May 30, 2018 - Young Han Solo Actor Alden Ehrenreich on 'Solo,' 'Star Wars,' and taking on an iconic role. He liked them as directors. The next Han Solo walks into a bowling alley on the edge of L. A.’s Koreatown, carrying a flip phone. It’s a really nice flip phone. Like a lot of budding cinephiles, he soon started making films of his own. The duo, best known for comedies like 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie, reportedly never saw eye to eye with the studio on the movie’s tone. He started another little theater group, just to keep busy between auditions, and sometimes Beatty and Annette Bening would come see his plays. Top of the line. So I was hanging in there, like, I sure hope this gets made. “They said, ‘We were let go,’ and that’s it. His father died when he was just seven years old under tragic circumstances that he won’t discuss. “For a crew to do that would mean they hated [Lord and Miller], which was not by any stretch the case.”.