Within the nascent days of the pandemic, many discovered themselves taking part in actions that may in any other case have been deemed out-of-character (see: sourdough, jigsaw puzzles, ceramics.) Alden Ehrenreich, the actor who performed a younger Han Solo and has labored with everybody from the Coen Brothers to Park Chan-wook, discovered himself Googling Los Angeles business actual property.
For years, Ehrenreich would stroll into varied areas — mates’ homes, eating places, wherever with a semi-raised platform, actually — and supply the identical chorus: “You might do a theater right here.” The pandemic-induced downtime gave him the area to lastly pursue a long-held want to open a theater in Los Angeles. And the Google search led him to Huron Substation, a historic constructing within the Cypress Park neighborhood within the northeast of the town.
Initially constructed as a service station for Los Angeles’s one-time Yellow trolley automobiles up till the Sixties, Huron has been extra just lately used as a marriage and occasion area. 4 years in the past, Ehrenreich turned its latest proprietor and launched Huron Station Playhouse.
“I feel it’s very exhausting for folks in L.A. particularly and for artists, to not find yourself working in isolation and have the pressures of the trade and the pressures of their standing that 12 months, regardless of the hell it may be, to affect their work,” says the 35-year-old. Impressed by inventive collectives like American Zoetrope (Ehrenreich labored with co-founder Francis Ford Coppola on 2009 indie drama Tetro), filmmaker John Cassavetes’ ensembles or Lee Strasberg’s Group Theater, Ehrenreich needs to construct Huron as an area for group inventive experiences with out the noise that may include working in and adjoining to Hollywood.
For the reason that starting, he has drawn comparisons to actors of yore. Even Ehrenreich’s strategy to the leisure trade — director-centric, a choice for movie over tv, and normal wariness of perceived star energy — additionally seems like a throwback. Says Zach Cregger, the director behind the actor’s newest function Weapons out this weekend, of an anomalous Ehrenreich: “This particular person seems like they had been teleported from one other Earth, the place he’s the most important film star on that planet.”
Ehrenreich is quietly, methodically carving out one of many extra attention-grabbing careers for an actor his age. And he’s unabashed about his ambition to infuse some artistry in an more and more corporatized Hollywood. Says Ehrenreich, “90 % of what you hear is ‘That is the worst time for the enterprise.’ Or, ‘Issues aren’t like they was once.’ However issues are by no means like they was once, so that you both bemoan that, otherwise you discover a solution to go along with it.”
On a late July afternoon, Ehrenreich is strolling round Huron, stating the vaulted ceilings and crimson brick that’s now charred black because of a fireplace within the ’80s when it was a welding operation. A Los Angeles native, Ehrenreich grew up within the Palisades going to the town’s theater choices, watching performs like All My Sons starring Laurie Metcalf at The Geffen Playhouse. The dream is that Huron might be, Ehrenreich explains, “an off-Broadway area for L.A., the place the most effective of the previous few years of theater, a few of these nice, smaller performs that aren’t actually the best match for the Geffen or The Taper can come.”
Final 12 months, Huron Station Playhouse debuted its programming with a sequence of 5 play readings that featured actors like Dylan O’Brien and Stephanie Hsu. There are appearing courses on Monday nights, and a playwrights circle each different Wednesday. Youngsters and teenage arts courses may also be on supply. The plan is to have full staged productions beginning this spring and to herald 92nd Avenue Y-style conversations sequence into the fold. Huron is becoming a member of a rising variety of more and more well-liked eastside leisure areas. There’s Zebulon and the Lodge Room for music, Vidiots as a movie revival home and The Elysian for comedy.
Huron Substation Playhouse
MK Sadler
On a private stage for Ehrenreich, Huron is a inventive outlet with out the exterior pressures that may include working in leisure. “I’ve watched folks lose a few of their urge for food to experiment, and begin pondering, ‘How can I write one thing that’s going to get me into this author’s room?” he continues. “All of us should make sure concessions, however loads of occasions what occurs is somebody will make these concessions, and so they’ll put one thing in a drawer for thus lengthy that once they go to the drawer, it’s not there anymore.”
Ehrenreich is not any stranger to the ebbs and flows of the trade. His credit have run the gamut from younger grownup fare (Stunning Creatures) to auteur dramas (Blue Jasmine) and, after all, Star Wars with 2018’s Solo. Han Solo is the kind of character that may simply eclipse a performer, like taking part in Jesus Christ or Santa Claus. However within the years since, Ehrenreich has gone toe-to-toe with the likes of Robert Downey Jr. in Christopher Nolan drama Oppenheimer and with a drug-addled CG Grizzly in horror comedy Cocaine Bear.
his movies, he doesn’t appear involved with being on the prime of the decision sheet. “I’ve not gone after sure alternatives that may have been very helpful from a profession standpoint,” he says. As a substitute, he’s extra within the combination. “Over the course of an entire profession, I simply need it to really feel like me,” he says. And, as of late, he has been joyful to be approached about initiatives that hit a little bit nearer to house. “I’ve performed the idealistic boyish characters for lots longer than I felt like that. Over the past 4 or 5 years, I get to play folks with some miles on them, trigger that’s how I really feel,” he says with amusing.
His newest function is in Cregger’s horror-thriller Weapons, during which he performs a would-be sober cop serving to to research the unusual disappearance of 17 native elementary faculty youngsters, all from the identical classroom that simply so occurs to be taught by his ex-girlfriend and onetime consuming buddy, performed by Julia Garner.
Courtesy Warner Bros. Photos
Says Cregger, “After I noticed him in Hail, Caesar!, I used to be identical to, ‘This efficiency is a miracle!’” Within the Coens’ outdated Hollywood comedy, Ehrenreich performs a Western movie star Hobie Doyle whom the studio is attempting to mildew into their subsequent main man, to little success however a lot hilarity.
“I’ve mentioned this to his face, so I don’t suppose he’d thoughts, however he’s been in a few motion pictures that I actually don’t like, however he’s so nice in these motion pictures,” Cregger continues. “Even when he’s acquired materials that I feel just isn’t worthy of him, he’s in a position to spin it into gold and by no means be boring.”
As a moviegoer, Ehrenreich largely avoids horror. After a very scarring viewing of The Sixth Sense at too impressionable an age, he forewent the Ring and Noticed horror titles of his youth. Extra just lately, he appreciates the inventive boon in horror filmmaking popping out of indie outfits like Neon, A24 and Mubi, however isn’t within the viewers for them. He explains, “The factor that some folks discover enjoyable, I discover disturbing.”
Ehrenreich was despatched the script for Weapons, and a few dozen pages in, he thought it was “top-of-the-line I’ve ever learn.” He favored that the film, which is advised in shifting views, forgoes any exposition in favor of dropping audiences in the course of some most distressing, comical and harrowing moments of those folks’s lives. Says the actor, “You don’t know [the character’s] backstory, however Paul’s clearly in a spot the place he’s misplaced management, and that’s after we meet him.”
To prep, Ehrenreich attended Alcoholics Nameless conferences and spent a while with a cop. In a film of actually wild moments, it’s notable that Cregger counts his favourite scene as the easy back-and-forth the place Garner and Ehrenreich are sitting and reconnecting in a bar.
After Weapons’ launch, Ehrenreich, who directed the quick movie Shadow Brother Sunday in 2023, has cleared the remainder of 2025 to complete writing what he hopes might be his function directorial debut. Over the previous 18 years, the actor has been squirrelling away “methods of constructing a movie set a wholesome village,” he says, noting that on the set for Weapons, Cregger had his solid and crew stretch for quarter-hour collectively at first of every day.
Regardless of fixed dialog about contraction and normal Hollywood disillusionment, Ehrenreich is worked up in regards to the potential for this second in filmmaking. He anticipates making his movie independently to present him management over who’s in entrance and behind the digital camera, and he’s affected person if not steadfast about directing aspirations. “I don’t know if I’ll must make a couple of motion pictures which can be wonky till I make a great one, or whether or not I’m going to have the ability to make a great one proper out of the gate,” he says. “However I do know, it doesn’t matter what, that’s the place I wish to go subsequent.”
The playhouse, Weapons and his directing ambitions are all in keeping with a profession that he’s hopeful will carry him by an at all times fickle trade. “Coppola mentioned this factor that you just’re going to succeed and fail the identical quantity of occasions, it doesn’t matter what you do. So what issues is the place you’re placing your emphasis,” he says. “It’s not about being cool. It’s all in an effort to attempt to hold the hearth alive.”
