It’s safe to say that Disney is always thinking big, especially with their major properties like Star Wars. Everything is seen as a potential franchise; even the cast of Rogue One signed multi-picture deals and we saw how that film ended. So it’s perhaps not a surprise to learn that Solo: A Star Wars Story is looked at in the same way. The only surprise is how the news got out.
In an interview with Esquire, star Alden Ehrenreich had a brain fart when asked about possible sequels, and the number of appearances in his contract…
“Three. I don’t know if that’s officially, uh, public. But—yeah.”
Would that it were so simple, young Ehrenreich.
So he goofed up, and he’ll probably get a testy email from some faceless suit at Lucasfilm. No big deal, because further movies will depend on how this one does, and I think the jury is very much out on that.
Ehrenreich also took time to talk about the behind-the-scenes drama that surrounded Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s time on set. The directors’ free-wheeling approach was rubbing some in Lucasfilm the wrong way, most notably Kathleen Kennedy who holds all the juice. If she’s not happy, it’s a big problem. But Ehrenreich says he and the other actors were mostly removed from all of that stuff. They just showed up and did their jobs…
“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…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 also shoots down rumors the crew broke out into applause when Lord and Miller were fired, calling those reports “bullshit”, and sings the praises of Ron Howard who stepped up in their place…
“Everybody’s hackles are raised a bit, and Ron had this ability to come in and deal with morale and get everybody enthusiastic about, A, what we’d already shot, because I think his feeling was that a lot of what we’d already done was really good, and, B, the direction for the next piece of it. He knew how to navigate a tricky situation, and almost from the first or second day everybody pretty quickly recharged and got excited again about the movie.”
