Speed Demon

DISCOVERED BY STEVEN SPIELBERG AT THIRTEEN, ALDEN EHRENREICH HAS BLAZED A PATH ON THE LEADING-MAN FAST TRACK, WORKING WITH FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, THE COEN BROTHERS, AND OTHERS—ALL BEFORE TURNING THIRTY. NOW, IN A FILM THAT JETTISONED ITS DIRECTORS MIDSTREAM, HE MAKES HIS RISKIEST MOVE: TAKING ON ONE OF CINEMA’S MOST ICONIC ROLES, HAN SOLO.

- Alex Pappademas

THE NEXT HAN SOLO walks into a bowling alley on the edge of L. A.’s Koreatown, carrying a flip phone.

It’s a really nice flip phone. Top of the line. Looks like you could comfortably play Bejeweled on it for hours if you were stuck in an elevator in 2007. But this sort of dumbphone is also the most low-tech gadget you can carry while still being technically on-grid, which is how Alden Ehrenreich has come to prefer it lately.

“I had an iPhone,” he says, “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.”

When he has the means to do that, Ehrenreich says, “I’m less able to be where I am, a little bit.”

Today, smartphone-less and slightly more fully present, Ehrenreich finds a seat in the bowling alley’s otherwise empty sports bar and sips Diet Coke from a Styrofoam cup. He’s twenty-eight, but at the moment he looks younger, like an undergrad. Button-down western-cut shirt, windbreaker, utilitarian black hiking boots. A few days’ growth of beard softens his absurdly sharp jawline, knocks down the overall movie-star wattage of his resting face.

All told, he will hang out in this bowling alley for about three hours, and during that time he will be recognized and approached only twice—once by Justine, who is very sorry to interrupt but just wants to tell him that she loved him in the movie Beautiful Creatures (a 2013 YA-fantasy flop); and once by a skinny dude with a hipster mustache, who doesn’t really count because he recognizes Ehrenreich from NYU, where they took a class together on the history of the atomic bomb.