Alden Ehrenreich’s favourite actor of all time: “Such a beautiful person onscreen”
If you haven’t yet seen the new Zach Cregger horror-mystery Weapons, we very much suggest you do so as soon as possible.
A masterful mix of genres with some of the best character acting in years from an ensemble cast, it’s an absolutely engrossing watch, often from between your fingers. One of the pivotal characters is a small-town cop called Paul, brilliantly played by Alden Ehrenreich, and without giving too much away, he goes on a hell of a journey over the course of two hours.
Although Ehrenreich had a leading role in the 2016 Coen brothers comedy Hail, Caesar!, he really rose to prominence as a young Han Solo in the 2018 spin-off Solo: A Star Wars Story, following up with roles in the likes of unhinged drug-addled animal chaos Cocaine Bear and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
The actor’s early story is quite something and indicative of someone who was inherently destined to star in films. Born in Los Angeles, he was named after the Field of Dreams director Phil Alden Robinson, a friend of his father’s, and when he made an amateur comedy video as a teen, it was seen by none other than Steven Spielberg. The directing icon felt he had potential, helped get him an agent, and after a spell studying acting at New York University, he landed a role on an episode of the long-running demon-hunting network show Supernatural.
In 2009, came his second brush with a directing great as he was cast in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, a drama starring Vincent Gallo. He did well enough to be cast again by Coppola two years later in the horror film Twixt alongside Val Kilmer, before daughter Sophia put him in her commercial for Christian Dior.
When picking his favourite movies from the Criterion‘s Closet Picks, one film that jumped out at Ehrenreich was the 1939 film Destry Rides Again, a comedy western directed by George Marshall.
Ehrenreich says: “It’s Jimmy Stewart, who’s probably my favourite actor, and Marlene Dietrich, and that alone, if you know what their energies are, is a weird enough combination. It just makes the whole movie so wild, and there’s these great fight scenes with Dietrich.”
He went on to gush about Stewart, adding, “But Jimmy Stewart’s just the most beautiful person onscreen, and there’s this, like, heart and fear and rage. It’s like an old Hollywood studio system western, but has just a weird other energy to it that I can’t really describe. But it feels like there’s something just really unique and special about it.”
Stewart’s first western, and his last until he did Winchester ‘73, 11 years later, the film is famous for a huge fight between Dietrich and Una Merkel, of which Merkel recalled, “Neither of us knew what we were doing. We just plunged in and punched and slapped and kicked for all we were worth. They never did call in the stunt girls. Marlene stepped on my feet with her French heels. The toenails never grew back.”
It is also notorious for the chemistry, real life or otherwise, between the film’s leads, with another director, Peter Bogdanovich, claiming that Dietrich later told him she and Stewart had an affair during filming, leading to a subsequent pregnancy.
Back to Ehrenreich, though, and with the jaw-dropping Weapons currently topping box offices around the globe, he is bound to achieve another boost in his profile and popularity. He’s already making the most of it by appearing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe show, Ironheart and a romantic comedy due next year with fellow Star Wars alumna Daisy Ridley, titled The Last Resort.
