Alden Ehrenreich Hates Horror Movies. Too Bad He’s in the Best One of the Year.

LOOK. WE GET IT. Horror movies are not for everyone. It takes a specific kind of sicko to crave the thrills and chills that would give anyone else nightmares for a week. Even some of the horror genre’s biggest stars are major scaredy-cats. Jamie Lee Curtis, who’s starred in seven different Halloween movies, doesn’t watch them. Scream queen Neve Campbell’s answer to the question, “Do you watch horror movies?”: “No. To be honest, I hate them.”

Add Alden Ehrenreich to the list. This weekend, Ehrenreich appears onscreen in Weapons, the ambitious new horror film from Barbarian director Zach Cregger, but don’t expect to see him at your local theater. “I just don’t have a sensibility where I have fun with it,” he says. “I don’t like watching that stuff happen to people. I genuinely find it really upsetting!”

We’d be lying if we said there wasn’t some upsetting stuff in Weapons. The movie follows the aftermath of a harrowing mystery: 17 children who all vanish at the exact same time in the middle of a single night. The only link between the children is that they were all in the same elementary school homeroom. The story is then told through chapters from the perspectives of different characters: Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), the teacher of that ill-fated class, now reviled by her community. Alex (Cary Christopher), the only kid in Ms. Gandy’s class who didn’t disappear. Archer (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the kids who did. James (Austin Abrams), a homeless addict who stumbles his way into the center of the mystery. And Ehrenreich’s Paul, an alcoholic police officer who feels out of control in his own life and sees all the disarray as an opportunity to take action. Each character pulls on a different thread, slowly revealing the horror beneath. It’s a compelling way to tell a scary story.

It’s also not Ehrenreich’s first time being part of a haunting story like this. The first two movies of his career were both directed by Francis Ford Coppola, the second of which was 2011’s Twixt, a divisive vampire flick costarring the likes of Elle Fanning, Bruce Dern, and the late Val Kilmer. And while Ehrenreich has genre-hopped his whole career, a through line has been his desire to work with exciting directors. In 2016, he appeared in Joel and Ethan Coen’s comedy Hail, Caesar! In 2023, he shared the screen with Robert Downey Jr. in Christopher Nolan’s Best Picture Oscar-winner Oppenheimer.

And after Barbarian and Weapons, Cregger has solidified his own place as a rising auteur. For Ehrenreich, that’s worth a few sleepless nights. “Some of the best, most interesting filmmaking right now is actually happening in horror—this movie included, to Zach’s credit,” Ehrenreich says. But his job, he adds, is to bring a director’s world to life, regardless of genre. “No human being actually lives in a genre. Whether a movie is a comedy or a horror, the character doesn’t know that. He’s just a guy dealing with what he’s dealing with.”

As Weapons arrives in theaters, poised to be one the year’s best reviewed films and tracking to be a box office hit, Men’s Health spoke with Ehrenreich and bringing the eerie, complex, and—yes—very scary, story to life.

MEN’S HEALTH: Weapons is broken up into sections told through different character perspectives. Writer-director Zach Cregger said he was inspired by Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, which has a similar structure. Your co-star Austin Abrams referenced it in an interview with us last year too. Did Zach reference it with you too?

ALDEN EHRENREICH: Zach did reference Magnolia. It was the only movie he really referenced when we were first meeting about the movie. I think what he meant was that this is a movie about people, about these characters as human beings, and that it’s a movie with a different level of emotional depth than your average horror flick.

MH: You play a police officer with a mustache, which is reminiscent of John C. Reilly’s character in Magnolia. Was that an intentional homage?

AE: When we first started talking about the character, we were like, “There’s no fucking way we’re going to do a mustache. We’re not doing a mustache! It’s super trope-y. Every cop in every movie has one. We’re not doing it!” Then I sent Zach a picture of me with a mustache, and he was like, “Don’t shave the mustache.” And then I spent time with some cops—and they all had the mustache! It’s just the way making movies goes so much of the time: you have some fixed idea in your head that you’re very passionate and excited about, then when you’re actually on the dance floor, you do end up doing something totally different, and it makes more sense and works better.

MH: Actors often say that growing facial hair or putting on their costume or holding a prop helps them get into a new character. Shea Whigham said that smoking a pipe locked him into his character in American Primeval. Did the mustache do that for you?

AE: I was in a war movie once and getting into the uniform—putting on the helmet and holding the weapon and all of that—that’s what did it. It’s the same thing here. I put on a little weight for the part, I grew the mustache, and I put on the actual uniform, and it made a big difference. It gets the character into your body in a different way.

At first, we decided that I didn’t need to wear a bulletproof vest. They’re heavy and it’s already a hundred degrees in Atlanta, where we shot the movie. But then I said, “Let’s do the bulletproof vest.” I wanted to be carrying it around. I wanted the weight of the world on this guy’s shoulders as much as possible.

MH: There’s a lot going on under the surface with the characters in this movie, and especially with yours. Sometimes he’s timid and ineffectual, other times he’s intensely angry and takes it out on others. How did you channel what could be categorized as toxic masculinity into a fully realized character?

AE: For me, a placing a character into a category [like “toxic masculinity”] is not the way that I work. I try to really pay attention to the individual beneath that. For anyone who’s living a life they didn’t fully say yes to in their deepest heart, who’s doing a job they don’t actually want to be doing, who’s with someone they don’t actually want to be with, who’s just stuck in a set of circumstances that aren’t a true expression of who they are—it’s easy for that person to end up feeling victimized by the world. That creates a lot of resentment and hostility and anger. I think passivity and rage are different sides of the same coin: choosing not to be active or empowered in living your life and then being angry that you’re not empowered. It’s also something that comes up a lot when talking about cycles of addiction: seeing yourself as a victim.

MH: There’s a lot to pack into the performance. How do you approach that?

AE: What’s so brilliant about Zach’s writing is that there are these lines of dialogue that suggest whole histories and backstories: the relationship between Paul and his wife Donna and his ex Justine; Justine’s past with the school and its students and their parents; Archer’s relationship to his son. The movie never really gets into detail about these histories, but you can still feel how this world is so fleshed out in the margins. There’s so much to bring to life, and I envision that as my job. My job is to show up and bring a character’s life into this world as thoroughly and with as much depth as I can.

MH: The characters all feel very lived-in.

AE: Zach has said, “Each of these characters is me,” and I think that’s why they end up having this level of dimensionality and depth.

MH: You’ve done action sequences in shows like Ironheart and movies like Solo, but this was a really physical role in a different way. It’s more raw and frantic. We see Paul have a series of escalating confrontations with Austin Abrams’s character James, a homeless addict and petty criminal who Paul becomes fixated on. How did you prepare for those chase and arrest sequences?

AE: I spent some time with a cop, and I sat in his living room with him and his wife, and the two of them walked me through the motions of what it would look like to tackle someone, cuff them, arrest them, do all these things, using his wife as the perp. She was very lovely—and a real trooper about it! They were both really helpful.

MH: Was there anything specifically hard to grasp about that?

AE: I would say cuffing somebody while they’re moving is not easy.

MH: Weapons is Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian, and it feels like watching a new auteur really coming into his own. You’ve worked with some legendary directors, like Christopher Nolan, Francis Ford Coppola, and Park Chan-wook, who were already well into that part of their careers. How do those experiences compare?

AE: There’s something really gratifying about it, because you get to be a part of someone’s filmic narrative, their ascendancy in the industry, and helping bringing a new voice into the world. You’re a part of something that’s bigger than your individual work.

I spent most of the beginning of my career working for people who were 50 years older than me. And I’ve more recently had the experience a few times of working for somebody who’s a peer. There’s something fun about the hang in that way—to have shared references and have grown up watching the same movies. It’s really satisfying and it’s also really fun.

MH: On top of being intense and scary, Weapons is also strangely funny. Zach has sketch comedy background. So does Jordan Peele. Do you think having a comedy background somehow dovetails into making a specific kind of horror movie?

AE: It must. Comedy and horror certainly are the genres that get the biggest, loudest reactions out of an audience. I even think Ari Aster even has a ton of comedy in his movies. There’s some symbiotic thing going on there, and it’s not something I totally understand!

MH: In the last several years, you’ve in big budget movies like Solo, high-concept comedies like Cocaine Bear, and MCU franchise installments like Ironheart. But you’ve also been in auteur-driven projects, like Oppenheimer and Weapons. Is that balance important to you?

AE: I would say that at this point and moving forward, the auteur side of that spectrum is just more true to me. It’s more true to who I am and to the movies I grew up loving. I’ve spent my whole career, since I was 17, trying to keep my hand on that rail. And I feel like I’m now in a place now where I only want to work on those kinds of things. I’m just a film nerd—and films are all about their directors. They’re about a lot of other people too, but the thing that defines a great film is typically a great director.

MH: Speaking of great directors, Steven Spielberg famously discovered you at his daughter’s friend’s bat mitzvah. What’s your favorite Spielberg movie?

AE: Oh god, that’s a really good question. Wow, you know what? Hook, easily. To me, Hook is the greatest kid’s movie of all time. It has everything—it’s so magical, it’s so emotional. On some level, I don’t think I’ll ever love a movie as much as when I was four years old and I loved Hook.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

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