In the nascent days of the pandemic, many found themselves participating in activities that would otherwise have been deemed out-of-character (see: sourdough, jigsaw puzzles, ceramics.) Alden Ehrenreich, the actor who played a young Han Solo and has worked with everyone from the Coen Brothers to Park Chan-wook, found himself Googling Los Angeles commercial real estate.
For years, Ehrenreich would walk into various spaces — friends’ houses, restaurants, anywhere with a semi-raised platform, really — and offer the same refrain: “You could do a theater here.” The pandemic-induced downtime gave him the space to finally pursue a long-held desire to open a theater in Los Angeles. And the Google search led him to Huron Substation, a historical building in the Cypress Park neighborhood in the northeast of the city.
Originally built as a service station for Los Angeles’s one-time Yellow trolley cars up until the 1960s, Huron has been more recently used as a wedding and event space. Four years ago, Ehrenreich became its newest owner and launched Huron Station Playhouse.
“I think it’s very hard for people in L.A. in particular and for artists, to not end up working in isolation and have the pressures of the industry and the pressures of their status that year, whatever the hell it might be, to influence their work,” says the 35-year-old. Inspired by creative collectives like American Zoetrope (Ehrenreich worked with co-founder Francis Ford Coppola on 2009 indie drama Tetro), filmmaker John Cassavetes’ ensembles or Lee Strasberg’s Group Theater, Ehrenreich wants to build Huron as a space for group creative experiences without the noise that can come with working in and adjacent to Hollywood.
Since the beginning, he has drawn comparisons to actors of yore. Even Ehrenreich’s approach to the entertainment industry — director-centric, a preference for film over television, and general wariness of perceived star power — also feels like a throwback. Says Zach Cregger, the director behind the actor’s latest feature Weapons out this weekend, of an anomalous Ehrenreich: “This person feels like they were teleported from another Earth, where he’s the biggest movie star on that planet.”
Ehrenreich is quietly, methodically carving out one of the more interesting careers for an actor his age. And he is unabashed about his ambition to infuse some artistry in an increasingly corporatized Hollywood. Says Ehrenreich, “90 percent of what you hear is ‘This is the worst time for the business.’ Or, ‘Things aren’t like they used to be.’ But things are never like they used to be, so you either bemoan that, or you find a way to go with it.”
On a late July afternoon, Ehrenreich is walking around Huron, pointing out the vaulted ceilings and red brick that is now charred black thanks to a fire in the ’80s when it was a welding operation. A Los Angeles native, Ehrenreich grew up in the Palisades going to the city’s theater offerings, watching plays like All My Sons starring Laurie Metcalf at The Geffen Playhouse. The dream is that Huron will be, Ehrenreich explains, “an off-Broadway space for L.A., where the best of the last few years of theater, some of these great, smaller plays that aren’t really the right fit for the Geffen or The Taper can come.”
Last year, Huron Station Playhouse debuted its programming with a series of five play readings that featured actors like Dylan O’Brien and Stephanie Hsu. There are acting classes on Monday nights, and a playwrights circle every other Wednesday. Kids and teen arts classes can also be on offer. The plan is to have full staged productions starting this spring and to bring in 92nd Street Y-style conversations series into the fold. Huron is joining a growing number of increasingly popular eastside entertainment spaces. There’s Zebulon and the Lodge Room for music, Vidiots as a film revival house and The Elysian for comedy.
Huron Substation Playhouse
MK Sadler
On a personal level for Ehrenreich, Huron is a creative outlet without the external pressures that can come with working in entertainment. “I have watched people lose some of their appetite to experiment, and start thinking, ‘How can I write something that’s going to get me into this writer’s room?” he continues. “We all have to make certain concessions, but a lot of times what happens is someone will make those concessions, and they’ll put something in a drawer for so long that when they go to the drawer, it’s not there anymore.”
Ehrenreich is no stranger to the ebbs and flows of the industry. His credits have run the gamut from young adult fare (Beautiful Creatures) to auteur dramas (Blue Jasmine) and, of course, Star Wars with 2018’s Solo. Han Solo is the type of character that can easily eclipse a performer, like playing Jesus Christ or Santa Claus. But in 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.
Looking at his films, he doesn’t seem concerned with being at the top of the call sheet. “I have not gone after certain opportunities that would have been very beneficial from a career standpoint,” he says. Instead, he is more interested in the aggregate. “Over the course of a whole career, I just want it to feel like me,” he says. And, as of late, he has been happy to be approached about projects that hit a little closer to home. “I’ve played the idealistic boyish characters for a lot longer than I felt like that. Over the last four or five years, I get to play people with some miles on them, cause that’s how I feel,” he says with a laugh.
His latest role is in Cregger’s horror-thriller Weapons, in which he plays a would-be sober cop helping to investigate the strange disappearance of 17 local elementary school kids, all from the same classroom that just so happens to be taught by his ex-girlfriend and onetime drinking buddy, played by Julia Garner.
Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Says Cregger, “When I saw him in Hail, Caesar!, I was just like, ‘This performance is a miracle!’” In the Coens’ old Hollywood comedy, Ehrenreich plays a Western film star Hobie Doyle whom the studio is trying to mold into their next leading man, to little success but much hilarity.
“I’ve said this to his face, so I don’t think he’d mind, but he’s been in a couple of movies that I really don’t like, but he is so great in those movies,” Cregger continues. “Even if he’s got material that I think is not worthy of him, he’s able to spin it into gold and never be boring.”
As a moviegoer, Ehrenreich largely avoids horror. After a particularly scarring viewing of The Sixth Sense at too impressionable an age, he forewent the Ring and Saw horror titles of his youth. More recently, he appreciates the creative boon in horror filmmaking coming out of indie outfits like Neon, A24 and Mubi, but isn’t in the audience for them. He explains, “The thing that some people find fun, I find disturbing.”
Ehrenreich was sent the script for Weapons, and a couple of dozen pages in, he thought it was “one of the best I’ve ever read.” He liked that the movie, which is told in shifting perspectives, forgoes any exposition in favor of dropping audiences in the middle of some most distressing, comical and harrowing moments of these people’s lives. Says the actor, “You don’t know [the character’s] backstory, but Paul’s clearly in a place where he’s lost control, and that’s when we meet him.”
To prep, Ehrenreich attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and spent some time with a cop. In a movie of truly wild moments, it’s notable that Cregger counts his favorite scene as the simple back-and-forth where Garner and Ehrenreich are sitting and reconnecting in a bar.
After Weapons’ release, Ehrenreich, who directed the short film Shadow Brother Sunday in 2023, has cleared the rest of 2025 to finish writing what he hopes will be his feature directorial debut. Over the past 18 years, the actor has been squirrelling away “ways of making a film set a healthy village,” he says, noting that on the set for Weapons, Cregger had his cast and crew stretch for 15 minutes together at the start of each day.
Despite constant conversation about contraction and general Hollywood disillusionment, Ehrenreich is excited about the potential for this moment in filmmaking. He anticipates making his film independently to give him control over who is in front and behind the camera, and he is patient if not steadfast about directing aspirations. “I don’t know if I’ll need to make a few movies that are wonky until I make a good one, or whether I’m going to be able to make a good one right out of the gate,” he says. “But I know, no matter what, that’s the place I want to go next.”
The playhouse, Weapons and his directing ambitions are all in line with a career that he is hopeful will carry him through an always fickle industry. “Coppola said this thing that you’re going to succeed and fail the same amount of times, no matter what you do. So what matters is where you’re putting your emphasis,” he says. “It’s not about being cool. It’s all in an effort to try to keep the fire alive.”
