While preparing to play a prequelized Han Solo in the biggest film of his life, Alden Ehrenreich came across an interview from the late ’70s with Harrison Ford, following the release of the original Star Wars. Ford was asked what it felt like to come off of such a massive cultural hit and responded with relief that he didn’t feel much. Ehrenreich could relate. “We all live under this mythology that success in a certain way is salvational and changes everything,” the Solo star says now over Zoom. “The actual back end of success or failure ends up revealing itself to be not nearly as meaningful as you think on the front end. I’ve had that experience so many times. A movie comes out and you want to go like, ‘Yes!’—and you just don’t.”

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Ehrenreich thinks back to that Ford interview after I ask him a similar kind of question. In terms of his own career, 2023 has been major—and not just because it’s the first year in which he’s appeared in a film since 2018, when Solo flopped at the box office. Ehrenreich is the fiery colead of this past Sundance’s smash premiere, Fair Play, which launched to No. 1 on Netflix’s movies chart last month. He’s a key supporting figure in both Cocaine Bear, the hit B movie comedy from Elizabeth Banks, and Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-front-running epic that’s grossed close to $1 billion globally (with no signs of stopping). His directorial debut, the short film Shadow Brother Sunday, has played festivals and picked up prizes around the world, a concrete step forward in his filmmaking ambitions.

So, a natural inquiry: How does it all feel? No short way to answer that. For starters, SAG-AFTRA’s strike rules prevented Ehrenreich from talking about most of these projects as they were released. Their buzz existed on text threads with family and friends and in the occasional headline he’d failed to avoid. “It didn’t feel nearly as real,” he says. As we chat, he’s been allowed to publicly discuss the films for about 48 hours. Then there’s the broader reality. At just 33 years old, the young actor has already hit Hollywood highs and lows, been forced to learn the transitory nature of any level of standing in this industry. He wonders if he’s built for it at all. “You just try to navigate, as we all do, caring too much about what other people think of you, and you try to listen to something that’s more important,” he says. “It’s very, very hard to do.” Especially, perhaps, when the feedback is as good as it’s been lately.

Ehrenreich is big on quoting. Titans of Hollywood, like Harrison Ford, have articulated ways of surviving through showbusiness that he’s not only absorbed, but adopted as a kind of philosophy. “Are you ready for a pretentious reference?” he asks me knowingly, as he works through one of many long, candid answers. “I go back to an AFI speech that Orson Welles gave where he said, ‘Maybe my films would’ve been better, but they wouldn’t have been mine.’”

Before turning 20, Ehrenreich made his feature-acting debut in Francis Ford Coppola’s noir drama Tetro, and was promptly compared to a young Leonardo DiCaprio by Roger Ebert. He went on to work with Woody Allen, Park Chan-wook, and most auspiciously, the Coen brothers in their old-Hollywood pastiche Hail, Caesar! His deadpan tour-de-force there, as a Gene Autry-esque dimwit singing cowboy, drew raves, and his profile skyrocketed. The film was released in February of 2016. In March, reports surfaced that Ehrenreich had been shortlisted to play Han Solo in the mega-budgeted eponymous prequel to be directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller; his casting was confirmed by May. After the film’s box office disappointment—relative to its $275-plus million budget anyway, as it grossed nearly $400 million worldwide—the actor took time off, given the process’s length from pre-production prep to post-release promotion. (One reason it took so long: Lord and Miller were replaced by Ron Howard mid-shoot.) More recently, he’s reflected on what that time gave him.

“I loved the original spirit of how they wanted to make [Solo], and I did it because it was this great platform from which I could do my own thing,” he says. “But what I realized at that point is: I hadn’t built my own thing enough to be able to do it…. I knew that I didn’t know myself in that way yet, and that takes a certain amount of time and effort and failure in its own kind of enclosed way. That’s what I spent that time doing.”

He ended his post-Solo hiatus with a role on the ill-fated Peacock series Brave New World, which was in production for eight months. Covid hit immediately thereafter. Suddenly, as the world emerged out of the pandemic, Ehrenreich found himself no longer shortlisted for the most plum roles available to actors his age. “When you go back and want to do something, you realize that there’s other people on the list who have surpassed you, and you have to fight harder for a particular role that you want,” he says. “I’ve lived that over and over again.”

But Ehrenreich quotes that Welles speech to affirm that he stands by his choices and his selectiveness. “There’s a practical arithmetic as an actor now that, frankly, I just don’t have the stomach for in the long run,” he says. “I don’t want to do projects on the cut. I don’t want to do things I don’t really love if I can avoid it—and with the cadence now, you kind of have to be doing a certain amount of projects.” Case in point: “There are things that I really wanted that I didn’t get. The heartbreaker is when the director goes, ‘You’re who I want, but I can’t cast you because they need to have this guy who came off this thing.’”

This makes Ehrenreich’s 2023 work stand out all the more. One could argue he’s conformed to the expectation of a hustling rising star. He does not see it that way: “When I hear people say, ‘God, you weren’t in a movie for five years,’ I’m like, ‘Holy shit!’” He made Cocaine Bear to ease back into the routine and had a blast. A few months later, he flew to Serbia to star with Phoebe Dynevor in the taut thriller Fair Play, about an engaged couple working at the same financial firm whose bond unravels when one is promoted over the other. Ehrenreich’s performance in this blazing feature debut from Chloe Domont, which Netflix bought out of Sundance for $20 million, is dark and explosive, in a key he hadn’t hit before. What pushed him to take such a risky, volatile approach? “You have to trust the filmmaker. You live and die on them—and if you’re going to die, you’re already dead at that point.”

Next, a quote from Francis Ford Coppola, via Alden Ehrenreich, as we get to Oppenheimer—the set to which he jetted directly from Fair Play: “A director presides over a film set.” Sounds simple enough, but Ehrenreich felt Christopher Nolan across every inch of the visceral biopic about the father of the atomic bomb. “The people who are on that set are thinking and feeling and paying attention in an entirely different way, and you feel like you're a part of something meaningful,” he says. There were no trailers in sight; the work could feel as intimate as a play, despite the scale of the production. “And there’s no fucking video village—the rise of that is such anathema to me as far as how films should be made,” Ehrenreich continues. “Especially the ones that turn into these different camps of corporate entities that are watching at the same time. It’s just such shit.”

Ehrenreich shines in a smaller role, as the patient and pragmatic aide to Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss, who faces a reckoning at his senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of Commerce after instigating J. Robert Oppenheimer’s downfall. All of Ehrenreich’s scenes are with Downey Jr., in fact, and he holds his own. He was familiar with working with A-listers. He looked up to George Clooney in Hail Caesar, played Cate Blanchett’s stepson in Blue Jasmine, was mentored by Woody Harrelson in Solo. “I’ve had really good experiences working with big names—very few assholes—but the drill typically is a ‘Hi, nice to meet you,’ and you do your work together, and you have some nice chitchat, and then they go into their world with their assistants and they travel into that universe that they live in,” he says. “So with Robert, I was very much prepared for that to be the case.”

Instead, Downey Jr. took Ehrenreich to dinner the first day they met. Then they went on a road trip. “We developed as much of a friendship as I’ve really ever developed with any actor I’ve ever worked with,” Ehrenreich says. He saw Downey Jr. devour Strauss’s biography, entertain the crew as a way of ginning himself up for a take, and learn his lines inside and out. (“I’ve come to sometimes expect from big names that they are not prepared, and it’s depressing.”) This is the space where Ehrenreich thrives. Getting the last word against a legend in Oppenheimer. Out-screaming Dynevor in Fair Play. Brilliantly, disastrously mimicking Ralph Fiennes in Hail Caesar.

“What I find exciting on screen to watch is when something real is happening between two people—not two actors who are delivering performances to each other,” he says. “Chemistry is a word that gets bandied about a lot, but when it’s really real, it feels like you can go deeper into what’s happening and play closer to the edge of the cliff.”

The last person Ehrenreich quotes for me is a fictional character. “I just saw Merrily We Roll Along, and there’s this line: ‘I’ve only made one mistake my whole life, but I’ve made it over and over and over again—and that’s saying yes when I should have said no.’” Ehrenreich heard this, during a recent performance of the musical’s Broadway revival, like a warning from the future. “I felt a fear of not adequately protecting this very ill-shaping embryonic thing,” he says. Put another way: Here he is again, generating attention, showing new sides of his talent before millions of impressed people. And maybe sensing the pressure to build on that.

“Hollywood is high school, it really is the same thing,” he says. “It’s the same sort of mentality and you’re trying to get at the cool kids’ table and whatever year, some people at the cool kids' table are the people who made the most amount of money. For me, it’s not that way.”

Ehrenreich hopes to get to a place where he’s directing at least as much as he’s acting, every two or three years. Working with the likes of Nolan and Domont “is getting the greatest film school on the face of the planet,” he says, and he’s been getting it for going on 15 years, from when Coppola cast him in his first big-screen part. His love for acting remains, rejuvenated by this past run of projects—up next he’s got the Marvel series Ironheart—but he’s not expecting to sustain this pace. “It’s a really hard thing when really well-intentioned people, who are worried for you and your career, are saying that ‘X’ would be really helpful in some kind of way,” he says. “But what I actually respond to is so limited—and it shoots me in the foot.”

He remembers reading one article saying that his Hail Caesar performance “fulfilled the promise” of his turn in Tetro. It made him emotional because the gap between those projects was seven years. “I felt a version of what most people would think I’m feeling after Star Wars or something—that was much more about me feeling good about my work again,” he says. Here we are, another seven years later, with Ehrenreich a little wiser, maybe even a little better, but no less himself. “I certainly could have gotten more notoriety had I said yes to certain things or just been oriented a different way, but I feel lucky that I was able to still be a part of all these projects,” he says. Then he smiles to himself. “Yeah. So I’ll see you in seven years.”