Just before Christmas in 2023, Alden Ehrenreich spent a week in an L.A. hotel room with Helen Mirren 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.
“It 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,” Ehrenreich says with a laugh. “We had a single day to figure it all out, so we did it in a total fugue state.”
A bit of disorientation, it turns out, is just what the movie called for. A Talent for Murder alternates between the tête-à-tête at Highsmith’s 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 on Oct. 24.
Movies fall apart all the time in this business. Are you able to take that in stride by this point?
I’ve had a lot of experiences like that at this point, so I’m 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.
Can you share what that was?
Oh, sure, I don’t care. It’s 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’s one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. It would be one of the best movies I would be in.
You’re playing two different characters in A Talent for Murder, one of which is Tom Ripley. Did you study other portrayals?
I went back and looked at Alain Delon in Purple Noon because that’s similar to the version of Ripley that I’m playing, and it’s also Highsmith’s 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’t want it in my head. I could probably watch it now. I don’t think we’re doing any sequels to this.
What were your first impressions of Helen Mirren?
She’s very dignified — but then she’s also sort of irreverent and mischievous. She never brings the “Dame” 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, “Oh, I love bats.” So there’s a lot going on there. But we did 90 percent of our work together in one room of Highsmith’s house, and I think one of our scenes was 25 pages long — and I hadn’t done a professional play at that point, so it was interesting.
Really? You won your first Tony this year and are opening a playhouse in Los Angeles, so you’re clearly drawn to theater.
I 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’m opening, so many of us got into this business because we were in a high school play, and now in L.A., we’re 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’m always trying to work toward the idea of, “How can we create something with zero thought of what it’s going to do for our careers?”
This story appeared in the Oct. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.