It is here, the time is now—it’s Cocaine Bear week at last. The premiere was last night in Los Angeles, bringing out director Elizabeth Banks, and stars O’Shea Jackson, Jr., esteemed character actress Margo Martindale—who is adorably excited to be in this movie—Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Brooklynn Prince, Keri Russell (sans Matthew Rhys, who is also in the movie), dramatic customer service guy Scott Seis, and Alden Ehrenreich. The late Ray Liotta, for whom this is one of his final roles, was represented by his sister, Linda Matthews, his fiancé, Jacy Nittolo, and his daughter, Karsen Liotta.
It's been a minute since we’ve seen Alden Ehrenreich. He was in the 2020 Peacock series that no one watched, Brave New World (cancelled after one season), but he hasn’t been in a feature film since 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. It would be easy to blame that drought on the failure of Solo, but of course, the pandemic had a hand in it, too, and now Ehrenreich is roaring back with three films this year. Besides Cocaine Bear, he was just at Sundance with the erotic thriller Fair Play, co-starring Phoebe Dynevor, and he’s part of the massive Oppenheimer cast. He also has an unnamed role in Ironheart, which was expected to air this year, but is probably pushed back to 2024, since Marvel is slowing down their output both to preserve whatever is left of their post-Endgame mystique and ease the crunch on the VFX pipeline.
I’m glad to see Ehrenreich coming back, he was a mid-2010s breakout that got sidelined by the double-whammy of a high-profile bomb—that was NOT his fault, I don’t think anyone assigned any portion of Solo blame to him—and the pandemic shutting down his industry for basically two years. Here’s hoping he has a big 2023, and that Marvel works out better for him than Star Wars did.
Also, in cocaine-related news, authorities off the coast of New Zealand found 3.5 tons of coke floating in the ocean, which is estimated to be 30 years’ worth of supply for New Zealand. New Zealand police say they destroyed the cocaine, but if New Zealanders start showing up at world events talking really fast with a million terrible ideas for sh-tty restaurants for the next 30 years, well. We’ll KNOW. Also, this IS the prompt for the sequel: Cocaine Whale. Can’t wait.
