Alden Ehrenreich Says ‘Weapons’ Team Resisted Cop Mustache At First: “There’s No F***ing Way”

SPOILERS: This post contains details about Weapons

As Alden Ehrenreich got into uniform for Weaponshe was determined to get this detail about the character just right.

The actor, who plays Officer Paul Morgan in the horror movie that opened atop the box office, admitted that he and director Zach Cregger were torn over whether his character should have a mustache.

“When we first started talking about the character, we were like, ‘There’s no f—ing way we’re going to do a mustache. We’re not doing a mustache! It’s super trope-y. Every cop in every movie has one. We’re not doing it!’” he told Men’s Health. “Then I sent Zach a picture of me with a mustache, and he was like, ‘Don’t shave the mustache.’ And then I spent time with some cops—and they all had the mustache!”

Ehrenreich added, “It’s just the way making movies goes so much of the time: you have some fixed idea in your head that you’re very passionate and excited about, then when you’re actually on the dance floor, you do end up doing something totally different, and it makes more sense and works better.”

In Weaponsall but one child in Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) third-grade class goes missing when they each mysteriously wake up and run off into the night at exactly 2:17am. The mystery of what happened to the kids unravels through the perspectives of multiple characters, portrayed by Josh Brolin, Austin Abrams, Cary Cristopher and Benedict Wong.

Ehrenreich added that he “put on a little weight for the part, I grew the mustache, and I put on the actual uniform, and it made a big difference. It gets the character into your body in a different way.”

“At first, we decided that I didn’t need to wear a bulletproof vest,” he explained. “They’re heavy and it’s already a hundred degrees in Atlanta, where we shot the movie. But then I said, ‘Let’s do the bulletproof vest.’ I wanted to be carrying it around. I wanted the weight of the world on this guy’s shoulders as much as possible.”

The actor also noted that he “spent some time with a cop,” recounting, “I sat in his living room with him and his wife, and the two of them walked me through the motions of what it would look like to tackle someone, cuff them, arrest them, do all these things, using his wife as the perp. She was very lovely—and a real trooper about it! They were both really helpful.”

While the cop is a tried-and-true archetype of the horror genre (I’m looking at you, Deputy Dewey), Ehrenreich’s character serves an extra layer of significance in Cregger’s directorial followup to Barbarian (2022). As if the title of Weapons wasn’t already a big clue of the film’s deeper meaning, one dream sequence features a gargantuan assault rifle hovering in the air with the time “2:17” flashing on the side, which some have theorized is a reference to the 217 House votes that passed a 2022 ban on assault weaponsa piece of legislation that has since been held up at the Senate.