NEW: Alden for Esquire Magazine pic.twitter.com/GXHqZAh74G

— Alden Ehrenreich News (@aehrenreichnews) April 23, 2018

I didn’t remember that Solo: A Star Wars Story is coming out so soon – the release date is May 25th!! It feels like yesterday when we were discussing how the film’s production was a gigantic shambolic mess involving a director-change MID STREAM and reports that the lead of the film, Alden Ehrenreich, was so bad that Disney had to hire a separate acting coach for him. At the end of the day, let’s be real though: this movie is going to make a billion dollars, probably more. We’re going to have Star Wars movies and Avengers movies from here to eternity. Anyway, Alden was tasked with doing some of after-action clean-up work for the film in his big Esquire cover profile. Some highlights:

He uses a flip-phone now: “I had an iPhone and then I’d forget my iPhone at home, and I’d be like, God, I feel so good. I’m having such a good day. And then I’d realize, Oh—it’s because I’m not checking my email nineteen thousand times.”

How many Solo films he’s signed up for: “Three,” he says, then flinches, understanding he may have just created a disturbance in the Force. “I don’t know if that’s officially, uh, public. But—yeah.”

On Phil Lord & Chris Miller being fired: “They had a different style than Ron [Howard] in terms of the way we were working.” He’s not sure what their Solo would have been like. He liked the script. He liked them as directors. He can’t say whether they were really taking an Apatovian riffs-over-script approach. “From the first screen test on, we played around with it a lot. We tried a lot of different things, rethinking behind the scenes. That was yielding a different movie than the other factions wanted. I knew what I was doing, but in terms of what that adds up to, you’re so in the dark as an actor. You don’t know what it’s shaping up to be, how they’re editing it, so it’s kind of impossible without having seen those things to know what the difference [of opinion] was, or exactly what created those differences.”

He wasn’t part of the decision to remove Lord & Miller: On any movie set, Ehrenreich says, regarding whatever arguments were going on between the directors and Lucasfilm, “the actors are at the kids’ table, unless you’re also a producer of the movie. So you’re really kept out of all the backroom dynamics of what was going on.” He wasn’t told that Lord and Miller were being replaced until it happened, he says. The directors themselves told him almost immediately. “They said, ‘We were let go,’ and that’s it. They had mentioned there were some disagreements before, but they didn’t get into it. They wished me the best with the rest of the movie. On a personal level, it felt emotional, for them to be going after we’d set out on that course together. Because I spent a lot of time with them, and we had a really good relationship—they also cast me. But I think at that point, they were kind of on board with [the decision], too. Like, ‘This is what’s happening.’ That’s not what they said to me, but that was the vibe I got.”

The story about the “acting coach”: The “coach” later identified as writer- director Maggie Kiley—to work on his performance has been mischaracterized: “She was part of conversations that happened for a couple weeks at one point but that was basically it.”

[From Esquire]

He actually spends the bulk of his Esquire profile dealing with all of that stuff, the “so this film was a gigantic mess behind-the-scenes” stuff. And as he said, as an actor, he was at the kids’ table. He wasn’t part of the decision-making. This was on Disney, LucasFilm and even more specifically, Kathleen Kennedy. I absolutely feel like Kennedy is not doing the best producer/manager work on these films at all, from the Rogue One shenanigans to this mess. They’re hiring the wrong people and spending a crazy amount of money to “fix” things in reshoots that should have been figured out in pre-production. As for Alden… he sounds like a decent guy. Good luck to him.

Alden Ehrenreich, a film by @alexilubomirski for Esquire’s May cover. (styling by @nicksullivanesq)

A post shared by Esquire (@esquire) on Apr 24, 2018 at 1:09pm PDT

Cover and Instagram courtesy of Esquire.