Alden Ehrenreich, 26, who co-stars opposite Lily Collins in Rules Don’t Apply—Warren Beatty’s first film in 15 years—has the intense, soulful look of a young Johnny Depp. Yet he played to comedic perfection the serenading cowboy Hobie Doyle in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Hail, Caesar!earlier this year, holding his own with the likes of George Clooney, Josh Brolin, Ralph Fiennes, Channing Tatum, and Scarlett Johansson. And Alden is about to become an action star as well, since it was announced last spring that he beat out 3,000 other hopefuls to play the young Han Solo in the next installment of the mythmaking Star Wars.
A student of Hollywood, Alden has made short films with friends since he was a teenager. “I remember when I was 13 and telling people I wanted to be an actor, and being met with ‘Have fun waiting tables,’ so I figured maybe that’s not such a great idea after all. But then this thing happened where I got discovered.”
He was discovered by not one but a quintet of celebrated filmmakers, who brought Alden across the footlights from film nut to filmmaker: Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Warren Beatty, and the Coen Brothers. When asked what those directors have in common, Alden says, “They are very aware of the tradition of film, and everyone before them. Younger directors don’t have that sense of history.” Indeed, Alden has a staggering knowledge of the great filmmakers and actors who came before him.
It was Spielberg who first spotted Alden, and like Lana Turner’s lucky break at an ice-cream parlor, “this thing” has become something of a Hollywood fable. The director happened to see a comic video Alden had made for a friend’s Bat Mitzvah in which he wore the Bat Mitzvah girl’s kimono. “If I had any idea that anyone would see that, I probably wouldn’t have done it,” he says. “It’s really funny that he could glean anything from that,” though it brought Ehrenreich small roles on TV shows and then a part in Coppola’s independently produced Tetro in 2009. (Though the film was little seen, it inspired the late critic Roger Ebert to call Ehrenreich “the new Leonardo DiCaprio.”)
But it was Ehrenreich’s hilarious performance as a Texas cowpoke in Hail, Caesar!—the Coens’ vamping love letter to 50s-era Hollywood—that got everyone’s attention. This month audiences will see him in Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply, as a charming country boy with a strong moral compass that saves him from the corruption of fame.
Ehrenreich has recently completed The Yellow Birds, directed by Alexandre Moors and based on Kevin Powers’s novel of the same name, one of the first to come out of the Iraq war It follows a soldier who makes a promise to his combat buddy’s mother (Jennifer Aniston) to keep him alive. And Alden has written and directed his first, professional short film, which follows a couple in a rocky relationship in the hours before they decide if they’re going to stay together. “He has something of a young Cary Grant,” Moors says. “Impeccable comic timing delivered from a square-jawed figure. He projects a certain maturity that is sometimes difficult to find in young actors.”
Those who know him are not worried that he’ll be overwhelmed by Star Wars success. “He’s very levelheaded and very curious about others, which is essential if you’re going to survive that kind of fame,” says Matthew Broderick, who appears with Ehrenreich in Rules Don’t Apply. “He’s a very curious person, and that will keep him sane.”
