🎧 Alden Ehrenreich’s Twisty Ride After Being a ‘Next Big Thing’

Everyone in Hollywood had a strange run of it in 2023, but few probably beat Alden Ehrenreich. As the actors’ strike brought the industry to a halt, Ehrenreich costarred in Oppenheimer, the biggest hit of his career. (He played an aide to Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss, a role Ehrenreich describes as “71st on the call sheet” in the eventual best picture winner.) Around the same time, he agreed to a starring role in the twisty drama A Talent for Murder, only to watch the independent production fall apart and lie dormant for a year. 

“I’ve had movies fall apart, and they say, ‘We’re going to try to get it back going,’ and it never gets back going,” Ehrenreich tells me on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “In my mind, this movie was not happening.” 

But A Talent for Murder did come back to life — and it’s heading to theaters this weekend. The Bleecker Street feature stars Ehrenreich as Edward, a New York book publisher sent to Switzerland to lure back a very important client: Patricia Highsmith, the imperious author of The Talented Mr. Ripley. The film starts as a two-hander confrontation between Edward and Highsmith (played by Oscar winner Helen Mirren), as Edward tries to convince the author to write one final Ripley novel — and she not only resists but taunts him. It then evolves into something even more fascinating, with Ehrenreich slipping into a dual role as Ripley himself, acting out the new story Highsmith is imagining. 

The captivating work closes out what’s been a banner year for Ehrenreich, who won a Tony in June for his Broadway debut in Becky Shaw and this month launches the first production at his theater in Northeast Los Angeles, the Huron Station Playhouse. In our podcast conversation, we went deep on how the 36-year-old actor decided to go all-in on Los Angeles theater (“I’m watching incredible artists in L.A. lose connection with the spark that got them into this in the first place”) and the tough lessons about fame and high expectations that got him to this point. 

Raised in Pacific Palisades, Ehrenreich was famously discovered as a teenager by Steven Spielberg in a bat mitzvah video, and later made his first film with Francis Ford Coppola (Tetro). All the attention left Ehrenreich earmarked as “the next big thing” — at least until he played Han Solo in Solo: A Star Wars Story, a Lucasfilm misfire that failed to launch a larger prequel franchise. “I think when I was 20 I listened to everybody a lot less,” Ehrenreich tells me, remembering his youthful confidence in what made good art, what made someone a hack, etc. Over time, he continues, he’s learned to ask himself different questions about what he wants to make and who he wants to make it with. 

“How do I keep moving forward and not do things that blunt the inspiration or make me jaded about it?” he continues. “When you are on a set of something you don’t care about, it does start to eat away at your relationship to the thing itself. And if you have a certain amount of success, then you and the people around you don’t want to do movies that feel like you’re walking back from that success. But you have to define what success is for yourself. It’s a bit of a dance every year.”

Hear much more from Ehrenreich on today’s podcast, which also includes a dispatch from me, Christopher Rosen and our guest David Canfield from fall festival season in Montclair, New Jersey (where Chris hosted a panel on the industry’s future; photo evidence above!), and Middleburg, Virginia. As I wrote in Monday’s newsletter, Middleburg audiences showed great enthusiasm for films as varied as La Bola Negra, Club Kid and Wicker. But the most-discussed film of the weekend wasn’t playing at any festival — it was You Can See Everything. 

You know what else you can see? Me, at the Montclair Film Festival! Following up on Chris’ panel last weekend, I’ll be in town on Sunday to join Chris onstage with Sony Pictures Classics co-founder and co-president Tom Bernard to talk about this year’s moviegoing boom and what it means for indie film. Get your tickets, and see you there!