Alden Ehrenreich Is Playing A Character People (Sometimes) Love To Hate

Alden Ehrenreich is rattling off a few of the films and actors that inspired him, as a child, to get into the business — and at first, they’re what and who you might expect (and for good reason): Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep. Then he gets to the heart of what really drew him to his current role on Broadway in Becky Shaw.

“There is a kind of role that I’ve always wanted to play that I feel like I’m getting to play for the first time, which is kind of a cocky, quick *sshole,” says the actor, 36. “I watched Chris Pine do a role when I was a teenager in this play Fat Pig that’s that. This Is Our Youth has that. Glengarry Glen Ross has Ricky Roma, especially, has that.”

The Gina Gionfriddo play, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, gives him ample opportunity to do so. Ehrenreich plays the acerbic, hard-edged Max, whom his childhood friend and her husband set up on a date with the titular character. The match goes horribly awry, exposing each character’s many flaws in the process. Such flaws, however, don’t make people unlovable, which Ehrenreich says is part of the show’s appeal.

“Even if you read [Gionfriddo’s] preface to the play, it’s really interesting because she talks about people wanting to ascribe guilt or blame or who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy,” he says. “And she kind of says, ‘I would fix up any of these people with my friends, maybe with some caveats.’”

Ehrenreich, who starred in the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar! and played Han Solo in 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, was discovered by Steven Spielberg at age 14 in a bat mitzvah video, in which the director’s daughter also appeared. “They showed me the video, and I loved it, and I got him an agent,” Spielberg told Entertainment Tonight in 2016. “That’s sort of how it all began.” While Becky Shaw, which Ehrenreich describes as a “shocking, biting black comedy,” is a return to the actor’s comedic roots, it’s also tempered by the right dose of drama.

“All the movies in the ’70s that I really loved — the Jack Nicholson stuff, always Dustin Hoffman — the line between comedy and drama was very, very blurry, and I always was drawn to that,” he says. “A lot of the plays that I really love have that combination, have a lot of laughs alongside the drama.”

On his Broadway debut with Patrick Ball and Madeline Brewer:

I think the moment it was brought home most clearly was when we came into the theater for the first time, stood on the stage, and took it in. Having spent my whole life loving theater and going to see shows… the first day of making this very magical, special, spooky place my home was a very moving moment.

Patrick [Ball] and Madeline [Brewer] are old theater hands — they’ve done so many plays. And so in a way, the whole cast, including Lauren Patten and Linda [Emond], has been a wonderful support for me in learning what this is like for the first time at this level. But mostly it’s just that we have a great group that really gets along in a lovely way.

On surprising audience reactions:

One of the things that’s surprising every night is just how different the reactions are. There are some nights when it feels very much like the audience is experiencing me as the villain of the piece and some nights where I feel like their best friend.

And there are people afterward who will come up and say, “I was rooting for you the whole time,” and people who say, “You did a great job because I really hated you and I wanted to punch you.” Maddie Brewer’s dad said to me, “You were really good — I really wanted to hit you,” because of the things that I say to her in the play. There’s something kind of exciting about a play that doesn’t have a clear sense of who’s a good person, who’s a bad person.

There’s a lot of nights where Maddie comes on, and the audience almost feels like they glom onto her as this kind of person who’s going to redeem this world they’re in and be the person that they can kind of connect with, because it’s called Becky Shaw, and then she says things to Patrick in the next scene that she’s in that the whole audience recoils at.

On the post-show Broadway scene:

I usually make eggs and have some whiskey after the show, but now that we’re more in a groove, I’d like to go out and be able to enjoy what I always pictured being this kind of post-show Broadway life. I really love Joe Allen. I’ve gone to Joe’s for years and kind of cosplayed that I was a theater actor, and now I am. Jameson on the rocks, usually, is my order there. I’ve gone to Bar Centrale, and we’re going to Sardi’s tomorrow night, which I haven’t been to since I was a kid.

On his day-off reset:

I’ve always taken Friday night to Saturday night off and not worked. I’ve done that for 10 years now, where I don’t read scripts, I don’t look at movies, I don’t watch or read plays, whatever. So now that we’re open, I’m trying to use Mondays for that, and that just becomes a decompression time and way of coming down because you’re living the whole story every single night — and sometimes twice a day — so the need to reset is pretty strong.

So as much as I’d love to go out and hit the town and do all the New York stuff that I love doing, it really just needs to be going on a walk by the river and staying in and maybe watching TV and reading and sleeping and painting and doing things that are relaxing. It’s nice to do something tactile — I think that’s very helpful.

On memorable stage-door run-ins:

My character says some things that are pretty, I guess chauvinistic would be the word, throughout a lot of the play. One night, I came out of the theater and was drinking a ginger beer, and this girl was in the stage door line and went, “Oh, you’re drinking beer?” And I said, “No, it’s a ginger beer,” and she went, “Well, that’s pretty feminine, huh?” And she kind of gave it back to me and wanted to neg me, I guess, which I found charming. It felt like she was engaging with the show, and I liked that a lot.

This interview has been edited and condensed.