{"id":655057,"date":"2026-10-23T19:00:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-23T19:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/655057\/"},"modified":"2026-10-23T19:00:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T19:00:11","slug":"alden-ehrenreich-on-reviving-ripley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/655057\/","title":{"rendered":"Alden Ehrenreich on Reviving Ripley"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJust before Christmas in 2023, Alden Ehrenreich<\/a> spent a week in an L.A. hotel room with Helen Mirren<\/a> and director Anton Corbijn, painstakingly rehearsing the film about novelist Patricia Highsmith they were about to start. A Talent for Murder was being adapted from a play, with Mirren set to portray the notoriously difficult author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ehrenreich as the junior editor dispatched by his publishing house to persuade her to write another novel in the series. Then, just before production, the project fell apart because of financing and scheduling.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt took over a year to make it happen again, and by the time we dusted off our scripts, we realized that no one took notes, especially about all the blocking,\u201d Ehrenreich says with a laugh. \u201cWe had a single day to figure it all out, so we did it in a total fugue state.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tA bit of disorientation, it turns out, is just what the movie called for. A Talent for Murder alternates between the t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate at Highsmith\u2019s secluded Switzerland home and a reenactment of the Ripley story the pair is brainstorming; Ehrenreich also plays the famed fictional con artist. He talked to THR about the drama behind the drama, which opens the SCAD Savannah Film Festival<\/a> on Oct. 24. <\/p>\n

\n\tMovies fall apart all the time in this business. Are you able to take that in stride by this point?<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019ve had a lot of experiences like that at this point, so I\u2019m somewhat thick-skinned about it, but it does depend on the project. I have one movie that I was cast in and all set to do that still feels like the one that got away. <\/p>\n

\n\tCan you share what that was? <\/p>\n

\n\tOh, sure, I don\u2019t care. It\u2019s a movie called The Fence, about a couple who moves into a small neighborhood and gets into a war with their next-door neighbors whom they have political differences with. William Hurt was going to play my neighbor, and then he died, and for whatever reason, nobody wanted to make it. But it\u2019s one of the best scripts I\u2019ve ever read. It would be one of the best movies I would be in.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou\u2019re playing two different characters in A Talent for Murder, one of which is Tom Ripley. Did you study other portrayals?<\/p>\n

\n\tI went back and looked at Alain Delon in Purple Noon because that\u2019s similar to the version of Ripley that I\u2019m playing, and it\u2019s also Highsmith\u2019s favorite. Anthony Minghella purposefully made a more dimensional and empathetic character [played by Matt Damon]. And then I avoided the Andrew Scott version at all costs because I have so much admiration for him as an actor that I didn\u2019t want it in my head. I could probably watch it now. I don\u2019t think we\u2019re doing any sequels to this.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAlden Ehrenreich with Helen Mirren, as Patricia Highsmith, in A Talent for Murder.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Of Bleecker Street<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat were your first impressions of Helen Mirren?<\/p>\n

\n\tShe\u2019s very dignified \u2014 but then she\u2019s also sort of irreverent and mischievous. She never brings the \u201cDame\u201d element into the room. There was one moment during filming where there was a bat trapped in a courtyard, and as everyone was running away, she went out and was like, \u201cOh, I love bats.\u201d So there\u2019s a lot going on there. But we did 90 percent of our work together in one room of Highsmith\u2019s house, and I think one of our scenes was 25 pages long \u2014 and I hadn\u2019t done a professional play at that point, so it was interesting. <\/p>\n

\n\tReally? You won your first Tony this year and are opening a playhouse in Los Angeles, so you\u2019re clearly drawn to theater. <\/p>\n

\n\tI remember seeing Laurie Metcalf in All My Sons when I was 16 at the Geffen in L.A. There was a very famous off-Broadway production of Our Town [in 2009]. I lived up the street and could just walk over and get rush tickets. I was 19 and having a hard time, so I saw it seven times. It was the most powerful thing. When I think about the theater I\u2019m opening, so many of us got into this business because we were in a high school play, and now in L.A., we\u2019re living in the shadow of so much commercial stuff, and I watched a lot of people lose their spark in the face of that. So I\u2019m always trying to work toward the idea of, \u201cHow can we create something with zero thought of what it\u2019s going to do for our careers?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThis story appeared in the Oct. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just before Christmas in 2023, Alden Ehrenreich spent a week in an L.A. hotel room with Helen Mirren…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[261343,458,146,49723,85,46,294358],"class_list":["post-655057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-alden-ehrenreich","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-helen-mirren","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-scad-savannah-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}