Alden Ehrenreich is your new young HAN SOLO!

I guess Alden Ehrenreich was kind of scruffy looking after all. And if you’re experiencing a sense of deja vu right now, it’s because yes, we have previously written about the Hail, Caesar! breakout star PROBABLY landing the much coveted gig of playing a young Han Solo in a still untitled upcoming Star Wars spinoff movie. But now, except for the actual official word from Disney themselves, everything appears to be a lock for the 26-year old actor.

The news was first reported by the not always reliable Page Six, which had me a little hesitant to reiterate it, but it has since been confirmed by most of the major Hollywood trades that Ehrenreich has indeed beaten out the reported thousands of young actors that Disney had considered – they really wanted to leave no stone unturned in the search to find an actor who could follow on from Harrison Ford’s iconic take on the character. In the end it came down to a few more well known names like Miles Teller, Taron Egerton, Ansel Elgort, and Jack Reynor, but Ehrenreich still came out tops.

The young actor had actually been discovered by Steven Spielberg at a friend’s bar mitzvah, after which he was introduced to Hollywood. He’s since done solid work for a number of high profile filmmakers like Tetro for Francis Ford Coppola, Stoker for Park Chan-Wook and Blue Jasmine for Woody Allen. He was even pretty decent in the otherwise kind of bad YA romance Beautiful Creatures. But he really made a huge blip on the Hollywood radar earlier in this year when he stole several scenes from a massive A-list ensemble cast in the Coen Bros’ Hail, Caesar!, and it was this performance that had a lot of people suddenly sit up and take notice of his potential.

The Han Solo film will be directed by The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street helmers Phil Lord and Chris Miller and is scheduled for release on May 25, 2018. But it seems that we may not have to wait that long to get a look at Ehrenreich as the young Millennium Falcon captain, as it’s also being reported that he is more than likely to make a cameo debut in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which releases in December this year. This makes sense as the timelines would match up, what with Rogue One being set before the events of Star Wars: A New Hope.

The Han Solo movie is being penned by Star Wars veteran Lawrence Kasdan along with his son Jon Kasdan, and will be a prequel showing us how Solo became the smuggler and scoundrel whom Luke Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi would first run into in that famous cantina in Mos Eisley in the first film. It’s already been confirmed that Chewbacca would also play a role in the story, and as The Wrap suggests it’s also possible that fan favourite jetpack-wearing bounty hunter Boba Fett might be showing up as well to have a brush with Solo, years before their famous meeting in Empire Strikes Back.

Personally though, I would prefer to leave Fett out of this – it just muddies their original meeting – and instead dip into the number of young Han Solo novels written in the now defunct Expanded Universe for some villainous inspiration. They could either also focus on showing how Solo enlisted and then left the Imperial Academy or maybe even exactly how he earned the life debt owed to him by Chewbacca.

So what do you guys think of Ehrenreich as the new Han Solo?

Last Updated: May 6, 2016