“Cocaine Bear,” a black comedy primarily based on an actual event from 1985, is the talk of the town in Hollywood and beyond leading up to its theatrical release on Friday. By this point, the movie’s name may only be unfamiliar to that hibernating.
Alden Ehrenreich, one of the movie’s actors, had his big break in the business under less peculiar but interesting circumstances: Steven Spielberg found him at a friend’s bat mitzvah.
At the 2009 bat mitzvah event, Ehrenreich, now 33, and some of his pals showed a shoddy home video he had prepared.
After attending a synagogue service in Los Angeles, Spielberg encouraged Ehrenreich, a Jew, to meet with fellow legendary director Francis Ford Coppola.
Ehrenreich would then get his first acting credit in a Coppola drama called “Tetro.”
Ehrenreich reportedly defeated several other Jewish actors, such as Logan Lerman and Dave Franco, to win the part of young Han Solo in the Star Wars spinoff blockbuster “Solo: A Star Wars Story” in 2018.
Ehrenreich has since appeared in several other movies, such as the Coen brothers’ “Hail Caesar” and Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine.”
He will also have a role in “Oppenheimer,” the highly anticipated movie by famed director Christopher Nolan about the drama surrounding the development of the atomic weapon, including Robert Oppenheimer.
A 175-pound bag of cocaine that dropped out of an airplane over Georgia is the real-life basis for the movie “Cocaine Bear.” A black bear overdosed on the bag’s contents after getting inside.
Elizabeth Banks, the film’s director and wife of Jewish sportswriter Max Handelman, remarked, “Hopefully, the movie lives up to the title.”
JOIN US ON WHAT'SAPP, TO GET INSTANT STATUS UPDATES AND BE IN THE KNOW.
CLICK HERE
