‘Ironheart’ Star Alden Ehrenreich Explains His Character’s MCU Connections and the Advice Robert Downey Jr. Gave Him

Warning: Spoilers for Ironheart ahead.

Alden Ehrenreich is breaking his silence on his top-secret Marvel role.

The actor stars in Marvel Television’s Ironheart (streaming now on Disney+), about brilliant young inventor Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) and the state-of-the-art technology she creates. When Riri first meets Ehrenreich’s character, he seems like a useful (if socially awkward) ally named Joe McGillicuddy, an ordinary suburbanite with biomechanical expertise (and a penchant for “Live Laugh Love” signs).

But Ironheart soon reveals that Joe’s real name is Ezekiel “Zeke” Stane, and he’s not just a technological genius: He’s the son of disgraced Stark Industries businessman Obadiah Stane, played by Jeff Bridges in the original Iron Man film.

Speaking to Marvel.com ahead of the finale, Ehrenreich revealed that he’s had past conversations about potentially joining the MCU, but when he heard about Zeke and Ironheart, he jumped at the chance to play a character with such a rich Marvel history. Here, Ehrenreich opens up about bringing Zeke to life and the support he got from his former costar Robert Downey Jr.

MARVEL.COM: You’re introduced in Ironheart as Joe McGillicuddy, but it’s soon revealed that you’re actually a character with an important history in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Zeke Stane, the son of Iron Man’s Obadiah Stane. How did you want to approach playing this character with a big secret?

ALDEN EHRENREICH: One of the things that seems really fun about the Marvel world is all the different interconnections and the different legacies. The fact that it’s a character connected to the original villain of the films was really cool. I had just worked with Robert Downey Jr. [in Oppenheimer] and become friendly with him, so it was a nice kind of synchronicity to be able to talk to him about it.

MARVEL.COM: I was going to ask if you got any advice before joining the MCU, but it sounds like you spoke to Iron Man himself.

ALDEN EHRENREICH: Yeah, I talked to him initially, and I ended up putting him in contact with Dominique. He was very excited and gung ho about it. I checked in and I said, “Is there some dark secret or some reason I shouldn’t do this?” [Laughs]

But with this show in particular, Chinaka Hodge is the showrunner, and what I liked about it is that she found a way for it to feel really personal. It’s a fun, poppy show with a great sense of humor, but she and the other writers found a way to talk about some things that are really personal about the world as it exists and about Riri’s internal psychological and emotional journey. So that made it interesting, and it felt like it had some depth.

MARVEL.COM: Tell me a little bit about working with Dominique Thorne as Riri.

ALDEN EHRENREICH: She’s super smart. She seems really serious about her work and also has some real connection points to this character. But we had a lot of fun together. Doing those scenes was fun for me and for her because it’s almost like a completely different storyline all on its own.

MARVEL.COM: There’s a great needle drop moment where the two of you have an emotional singalong to Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” in the car. What do you remember most about filming that together?

ALDEN EHRENREICH: Just going really hard. [Laughs] Just giving it our all and really singing and having fun.

MARVEL.COM: Were you an Alanis fan going into this?

ALDEN EHRENREICH: No, this was pretty new, and I had to really learn it. But I have a whole different awareness and appreciation of Alanis Morissette after this. [Laughs]

MARVEL.COM: Throughout the show, we see Zeke embracing these technological upgrades and modifying his body. As an actor, how did you want to approach playing a character who’s literally half man, half machine?

ALDEN EHRENREICH: Yeah, it was something fun. It’s fun to me when it’s less supernatural. [Zeke] is a little like Batman, I guess, in that sense. He’s just a guy. And that’s true of Riri as well: She’s created this technology to make a Super Hero — or super villain.

Some of those advances are real. It’s actually something that Downey has a real hand in. He taught me a little bit about bionics and what’s actually happening in that field, as far as people with amputated limbs getting these prosthetics that have robotics in them. I don’t really understand the ins and outs of it, but it seems like it’s a field that’s really helping people and is actually advancing in a pretty rapid way as we speak. It was cool to be a part of that vision of what these things could be used for. And of course, put in the wrong hands, it could go very much the other way.

MARVEL.COM: I spoke to Chinaka Hodge, and she talked about how she wanted the show to explore those real-life ramifications of technology.

ALDEN EHRENREICH: Absolutely. We’re certainly living through it now, where it’s more at the front of everyone’s minds than it was even when we shot the show. But [I love] these kinds of moral questions around how we use technology.

MARVEL.COM: Thinking back to filming, did you have a favorite or most memorable day on set?

ALDEN EHRENREICH: There are a few. It was really fun shooting the first scene where Zeke shows up as Zeke, with a shaved head and the kind of jumpsuit that Obadiah wears in [Iron Man]. That was fun because it was getting to play the more villain side of the spectrum. That’s a big part of this show: It’s a show where nobody’s a cookie-cutter bad guy, and my character really falls in the middle of that.

MARVEL.COM: This is a character who definitely does some villainous things, but he’s also very sympathetic. That’s got to be a fun balance to explore.

ALDEN EHRENREICH: Definitely. [Zeke] starts as the comedic relief in a way, and then he turns into not exactly a mentor, but maybe a voice of reason or a voice of guidance. Then, it’s teetering on being an anti-hero, if not a villain.

And the show leaves it very open. Even when we were shooting, we were really trying to find that right grace note for the last scene. We’re intentionally leaving that very open-ended, where this guy who’s lived in real isolation opens himself up to somebody for the first time, and then that person — at least it feels like to him — really betrays him. There’s a woundedness that comes out of that. So what road he's going to take as a result of that, we don’t know.

Marvel Television’s Ironheart is streaming now, only on Disney+.