Before Alden Ehrenreich was cast as a young Han Solo in “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” Lucasfilm conducted a casting search far and wide to find someone to fill the shoes of Harrison Ford in the role.
By March of 2016, the list reportedly came down to five candidates, of which Ehrenreich was one. The other four included Taron Egerton, Jack O’Connell, Jack Reynor and Blake Jenner and tests were conducted in London involving all those actors.
Egerton, now on screens in the Apple TV+ series “Black Bird,” recently spoke with the Happy Sad Confused podcast and revealed he took himself out of the running after initially auditioning for the part:
“I’ll be honest, I got on the Falcon. I was with Chewie. I was in the full costume. I felt like I got there, I did it, I lived it. It just felt to me like I didn’t feel… like you know when we mentioned earlier, that thing when I read the ‘Kingsman’ script and I was like, ‘This is… I’ve gotta do this. This is my part’. [With ‘Solo’], I just didn’t feel it.”
Since the film’s release and subsequent box-office failure, there has been the odd bit of chatter online about continuing the property – potentially on television. However co-writer/producer Lawrence Kasdan downplayed recently, telling Inverse this week:
“No, there’s not any talk of that. I’ve never been particularly drawn to expanding [Solo] into a show. But, I do talk to Jon [Kasdan] and Ron [Howard] a lot about what went right and what went wrong with the ‘Solo’ experience. I would be more interested in doing another movie, not a TV series.”
We do know an ‘event series’ focused on Donald Glover’s Lando Calrissian was in the works at Lucasfilm with filmmaker Justin Simien was announced back in late 2020, but there’s been no real update since then, and it’s still not certain if the project will get made.
