The Big Picture

Alden Ehrenreich’s career has experienced a resurgence in 2023, allowing him to showcase his versatility as an actor and take on a variety of roles from films like Oppenheimer or Cocaine Bear. Ehrenreich’s performances in 2023 have demonstrated his ability to excel in both comedic and dark roles, proving his range and talent as an actor. In the thriller Fair Play, Ehrenreich delivers a chilling and menacing performance, portraying a toxic and abusive character with complexity and depth.

Friends, Romans, film geeks, lend me your ears, I come to praise Alden Ehrenreich, not to bury him. The box office bombs that men headline live after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. Let it not be with Alden Ehrenreich. The noble Star Wars bros have told you Ehrenreich was ambitious for trying to step into the shoes of Harrison Ford: if it were so, it was a grievous fault. But here I am to speak what I do know. We all did love him once, not without cause (thanks Hail, Caesar!). What cause withholds you then, to mourn for his career? O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason by refusing to acknowledge either how he’s one of the best parts of the ensemble cast of Oppenheimer or his amusing performance in Cocaine Bear. Okay, all strained Shakespeare homages aside, Alden Ehrenreich’s career did seem to be temporarily D.O.A. after his headlined the infamous 2018 box office bomb Solo: A Star Wars Story. The supposed curse that plagues Star Wars lead actors seemed to be especially noticeable here, as Ehrenreich barely worked in the years that followed Solo beyond a lead role on the short-lived Peacock drama Brave New World. But then a funny thing happened. 2023 has offered plenty of opportunities for people to appreciate Alden Ehrenreich’s many talents as an actor. A guy who seemed to be down for the count as a classical leading man has been reborn as a versatile performer finally getting the kinds of big breaks he’s long deserved. There’s a reason we’ve gathered here to praise Ehrenreich instead of bury him alongside unsold Solo action figures…2023 has been his renaissance.

What’s Made Ehrenreich’s 2023 So Interesting?
Image via Universal

What’s truly made Alden Ehrenreich’s various performances in 2023 so much fun is that he’s refused to play just one kind of character. No more is he just settling for being a standard leading man in something like Rules Don’t Apply or even Solo: A Star Wars Story. He’s a comedic gangster in Cocaine Bear, an endearing audience surrogate in scenes revolving around Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer, and he’s a deeply creepy man in Fair Play. There’s not a lot of overlap across these figures and only one of them even approaches being the “lead” of the film he inhabits. That variety has allowed Ehrenreich to demonstrate plenty of range and remind people just why Alden Ehrenreich got on everyone’s radar in the first place.

Ehrenreich got his start as an actor in arthouse titles directed by Francis Ford Coppola, before showing a willingness to take on supporting roles in arthouse titles directed by the likes of Park Chan-wook. He could grab your attention even with minimal screentime in something like Stoker (a demonstration of his gift for functioning so well in ensemble pieces) while his commitment to esoteric pieces of cinema like Tetro exhibited a likable sense of creative bravura. Heck, even in the earliest days of his career, his attempts to be a traditional leading man in standard mainstream stuff like Beautiful Creatures never went anywhere. Ehrenreich was never meant to be a standard leading man. He was supposed to be something a bit more unorthodox, as exemplified by how beautifully he slipped into the role of Western star Hobie Doyle in Hail, Caesar!

Hollywood tried its best to box in Ehrenreich into typical leading man roles in the late 2010s with Solo and The Yellow Birds, but that’s never where this guy was meant to flourish. He always demonstrated a penchant for bolder acting choices that he’s got to really lean into with the wide variety of roles he’s taken on during 2023. Now he’s gotten to talk about bear vaginas in one feature before successfully going toe-to-toe with Robert Downey Jr. in another movie just a few months later. The versatility apparent in Alden Ehrenreich’s 2023 acting choices would be great under any circumstances. But the fact that his film roles this year have brought him back to the risky creativity that defined his earliest exploits has made his most recent resurgence doubly exciting!

It’s also been fun to see Ehrenreich get in touch with his comedic side in some of his 2023 endeavors. Cocaine Bear is an obvious example of this trend, with Ehrenreich using his dramatic chops to lend real urgency to gangster Eddie’s shock and terror over dealing with a drug-addled bear. There’s a reason his delivery of the line “the bear…did…cocaine!!” was in all the ads for Cocaine Bear, it’s really memorable and is extra humorous because Ehrenreich is saying it such faux-seriousness. Meanwhile, Ehrenreich gets one of the funniest moments of Oppenheimer in his nonchalant comment of “Well, they’re not” in response to a grand explanation by Strauss for his shady behavior. Hollywood has often wanted Ehrenreich to just be a bog-standard leading man who stands there and looks handsome, but even Christopher Nolan recognized that this guy has a sense of comic timing and gift for grinding laughs out of moviegoers. Ehrenreich has embraced those moments of lightness in his 2023 career…but he’s also been allowed to go much darker to great effect in this year of cinema.

RELATED: ‘Fair Play’ Director Responds to Audience Buzz From the Erotic Thriller’s Theatrical Debut

Did You Know Alden Ehrenreich Can Be Mean?
Image via Netflix

Given that one of Alden Ehrenreich’s greatest claims to fame is saying the phrase “Would that it twere so simple” over and over again in slightly off-key ways, one might have a difficult time imagining him in a role that’s meant to be intimidating. But one of the greatest triumphs of Ehrenreich’s 2023 cinematic excursions has been his ability to play someone so darn chilling in the thriller Fair Play from writer/director Chloe Domont. Here, Ehrenreich plays Luke Edmunds, an analyst at a hedge fund where he’s dating co-worker Emily Meyers (Phoebe Dynevor). When she gets the grand promotion he was always imagining he’d get with ease, their relationship is thrown into chaos due to the insecurity of Luke. He just can’t imagine somebody else, let alone a woman would get the gig he believes he worked so hard for.

The horrors perpetrated by Luke on Emily eventually range from trying to jeopardize her job to exacting physical violence on this woman, but Ehrenreich’s genius in his performance is conveying an ominous air in this dude long before he “snaps.” In a scene set shortly after Emily gets the promotion, Luke makes a seemingly “playful” comment to his partner about peeing on Emily as a way of “marking his territory.” The delivery of this line from Ehrenreich is jovial, seemingly without a hint of malice. But that’s what makes it eerie. Both Domont’s directing of this scene and Ehrenreich’s acting choices recognize that it’s much more frightening when men make aggressive dehumanizing statements and don’t even realize their horrifying implications. This is a handful of words that see Luke trying to use humor to reclaim a possessive attitude towards Emily, a turn of events beautifully handled by Ehrenreich.

Through this man’s performance, it’s clear to viewers (especially ones familiar with toxic dudes of this stripe) that Luke has always been bad news. He’s just now got the sort of insecurity that makes him take his rage at women and marginalized voices to the next level of transparency. Not everything in Fair Play quite clicks together (particularly in its final act), but Ehrenreich’s performance is consistently interesting in how it captures the way abusive male behavior is often hiding in plain sight under seemingly “friendly” guises. That’s a level of complexity and darkness that one might not have imagined Ehrenreich was capable of years ago. However, Fair Play, much like his other 2023 exploits, has reaffirmed this man’s remarkable versatility.

The expansive creative exploits of this man haven’t just been exemplified by Ehrenreich taking on darker roles than Hobie Doyle, though. They’ve even been reinforced by how 2023 saw the debut of Ehrenreich as a director with the short film Shadow Brother Sunday. It’s not at all uncommon for leading men in Hollywood to try their hand behind the camera, but it’s still fascinating to see Ehrenreich use 2023 as an opportunity to show off another side of his creative desires. Who knows what the future will bring about for Ehrenreich in his Hollywood career (beyond a supporting role in Ironheart in 2024), but 2023 has offered plenty of evidence for why it’s time we give Alden Ehrenreich an apology.