In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast features in-depth conversations with today’s most noteworthy actors and creators. Join host and senior editor Vinnie Mancuso for this guide to living the creative life from those who are doing it every day.
Alden Ehrenreich can tell you what it’s like to work with legends. He was discovered by Steven Spielberg thanks to a video he made for a friend’s bat mitzvah (true story). His very first film role was in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Tetro.” Since then, he’s worked with everyone from Warren Beatty and the Coen brothers to Park Chan-wook and Ron Howard (for the latter, he played a role you might know: Han Solo). Sit down with the actor, like we did for In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast, and he’s sure to have an auteur anecdote on hand.
Here he is, for example, on his “Oppenheimer” director, Christopher Nolan: “What was inspiring about Nolan was just honestly how much he doesn’t give a fuck, in the best possible way,” Ehrenreich tells us. “He is unapologetically focused on exactly what needs to get done. He’s very nice, he’s very warm, he’s very professional. He’s not mean or tyrannical in any way, but he’s not wasting energy trying to get people to think anything in particular or make sure that they are comfortable about what’s happening. He is just moving that ship.”
One of the few things Ehrenreich can’t go into detail about (at least not yet) is his role in “Weapons,” Zach Cregger’s follow-up to his bonkers surprise hit “Barbarian.” The film hits theaters Aug. 8 and has dropped a trailer, but details are still murky about what exactly is happening in Cregger’s next horror epic.
“I’m not a horror fan, but it is one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. I felt that there was something alive in it,” Ehrenreich tells us. “It is shocking. It is all the things that I think people are most interested about, which is: What is that surprise going to be? What kind of wild, unexpected, challenging, provocative place does this take you to?”
He continues: “But the thing that was so stirring to me is that it felt like such a portrait of a flawed and broken and downhearted humanity.… It was just in my bloodstream by the time I got to the end. It just affected me so deeply. It really gets to you.”
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