The mustache, he says, was a last-minute judgment call—Ehrenreich had cultivated it during COVID, but the plan was to shave it for Weapons, so as not to look like “the Lego version” of a small-town cop. “We went and did a screen test, just to vet it before I cut it off,” he says. “And we looked at it and we were all like, Yeah—it just works.”

But it works on Ehrenreich in Weapons because there’s a real performance happening behind it, imbued with a healthy dose of soured romanticism.

“Every role is a bit of a expression of where you’re at in life,” Ehrenreich says, “and I can’t play a guy who hasn’t experienced anything yet. And I still was getting cast as that, pretty long after I felt like I wasn’t that guy anymore.” By the time Solo came his way, he reckons, he’d come to “kind of the end of that. I’m still playing this young, idealistic, wide-eyed kid that I was in Tetro, and I just don’t feel like that guy. I’m not that person.”

Inside the building, the acting class has broken up for the day. Ehrenreich shows me around the space—the mezzanine where they intend to build noise-baffled meeting rooms, the old air-conditioning unit straining nobly but ineffectually to cool the room down. They’ve got to redo the HVAC, install a control board for stage lights, rebuild the stairs. An honest, humbling to-do list.

“I mean, you can’t get more substantial in a way than this,” he says of the theater. “It’s a fixed, permanent thing. Every ounce of work that goes into this is here in perpetuity.”

When he was around 19, he says, he saw a documentary he’s never forgotten, The Constant Forge, about John Cassavetes’ life and work. In 1981 Cassavetes spent his own money gut-renovating the Center Theater, a hole-in-the-wall just off Santa Monica Boulevard, and started putting on stage plays there; in the film, one of his collaborators recalls coming back to the theater to retrieve a forgotten jacket, hearing a clanking sound, and finding Cassavetes in the bathroom, fixing one of the toilets.

Ehrenreich loves that image—the great director kneeling on the tiles, repairing the shitter. There’s something, he says, about being an actor and going off and living in a hotel for a while while making films (putting energy into something that might end up ephemeral) and coming home to a building you own that needs a lot of work, a floor that needs sweeping, a toilet that does not get fixed unless you do something about it.

“Now, have I fixed a toilet here? Absolutely not,” Ehrenreich says. “But I would like to.”