Alden Ehrenreich On First Tony Nomination For 'Becky Shaw,'
Alden Ehrenreich in 'Becky Shaw.'
Marc J. Franklin
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Alden Ehrenreich received his first Tony nomination for his Broadway debut as the acerbic Max in Gina Gionfriddo’s darkly comedic play Becky Shaw.
It’s a role Ehrenreich is relishing, in part because of his character’s warped and complicated worldview, but also because he gets to deliver some of the play’s harshest blows.
As Max, he calls love a “by-product of use,” speaks about other people’s pain as an inconvenience to his own goals and snidely comments on his first-date’s attire saying, “You look like a birthday cake.” His character, a 36-year-old money manager, has developed this persona as both a power move and coping strategy after being adopted into a similarly sharp-tongued family who continually reminds him he is not actually their flesh and blood.
When that date, Becky Shaw, whose presence kicks off the central action of the play, asks for advice on how to handle Max, his would-be sister, Suzanna, says “Inasmuch as you can, don’t show him any weakness.”
And yet, Ehrenreich says audiences seem to alternate night-by-night between hating his character and cheering him on.
“There have been nights where some audiences have been so behind these things that me or Linda [Edmond] said that the whole cast is like ‘Easy guys. That’s a pretty fucked up thing to be excited about.’ But for the most part, those nights are just a different, joyful thing,” Ehrenreich said.
That also speaks to the power of his stage presence. The role also allows Ehrenreich to dig deeper into his love of theater after a string of onscreen work, including supporting roles in Weapons and Oppenheimer, and enjoying acting alongside an ensemble including Edmond, his even more eviscerating adoptive mother, Lauren Patten (Suzanna), his adoptive sister, The Pitt’s Patrick Ball and Madeline Brewer, who plays the titular character and will not let the catastrophe of their first date get in the way of a possible relationship.
He spoke with The Hollywood Reporter shortly after receiving the news of his Tony nomination May 5 about what it’s like to get into the mind of Max each night and what he’s taking from his experience to his new theater, Huron Station Playhouse, In L.A.
What made you want to come to Broadway with this play?
I wanted to do this for my whole career, act in a play in New York, whether that’s Broadway or Off-Broadway. And I had been looking for things, and I had actually begun to read this play a while back, and really loved it. And then I was told the rights were unavailable, and they were unavailable because of this production. And Trip [Cullman] is someone I knew a little bit. We talked about working together before, and we had a really lovely conversation then. And so when I found out it was him that was really exciting, because he’s such a wonderful director and this role, I just loved it.
What did you love about it?
It’s just an incredibly dynamic, entertaining role. And there’s certain parts and characters that come around that you know how to connect to and I felt that with this, and then the great sort of gratification and surprise has been in the work on it, both on my own and in the room with everybody, just how much depth and psychology and emotion Gina has brought to bear on this play and this sort of tight-knit dysfunctional community of characters. The roots just go so much deeper than I think I even totally appreciated when I first read it, and that was just giving you so much more to mine and and play with.
Do you see your character as a kind of a villain of the play, or is it more than that?
Even if I was playing someone who’s even more outright, and I have played people who are even more outright villainous, unless you’re Jafar in Aladdin or something like that, and maybe even not then, I don’t think anybody really conceives of themselves that way. So I think part of the important part of my job is you see that, and have an awareness of that, but then you really have to put that aside and understand the point of view. It’s why the acting work is very humanizing, because it forces you to think at a very deep level in a very empathetic way toward people who do things that you would find sort of abhorrent. This play in particular is very exciting to do because every night it feels like the allegiances of the audience are a little bit different. And there are nights where it feels like the audience is experiencing me as the villain of the piece, and other nights where they’re experiencing me v