DETROIT — The sneaky star of this weekend's "Reminders of Him" is orange, has four wheels, and is ready for its closeup.

In the romantic drama, which opened Friday, actors Maika Monroe and Tyriq Withers take a backseat to the vintage Ford F-250 4x2 Supercab that is featured so prominently in the film that it's practically its third lead. The truck is so important to the story that it's featured on the film's poster, and it even made an appearance Tuesday night at the movie's Los Angeles premiere, where stars posed in front of it on the red carpet.

Withers' character, Ledger, drives the hulking 1976 two-wheel drive vehicle in the film. It's painted bright orange, which matches the orange on the uniforms of the Denver Broncos, the team for which the Ledger character once played.

But you won't find any orange '76 F-250s in the wild; the vehicle was painted specially for the film, according to Ted Ryan, Ford's archives and heritage brand manager.

"We don't have one that was that precise shade of orange," Ryan said Thursday. "The closest we came to it was kind of a muddy mustard color, which was pretty interesting in and of itself, but it wasn't that orange color." (The Dearborn automaker did produce a Denver Broncos-orange Bronco in 1973, Ryan says.)

The truck's shade of orange — think Velma's sweater on "Scooby Doo" — is very specific to author Colleen Hoover's 2022 novel, on which the film was based.

"That damn truck," Hoover writes in the book, in the voice of Kenna, the story's main character (played in the movie by Monroe). "I laughed because it was such a bright orange that I couldn't understand what kind of person would willingly choose that color." (It's later described in the book as "the ugliest color of orange that I'd ever seen"; the film doesn't dig into the Kenna character's hatred for the hue.)

The truck would be a head turner even in the Dream Cruise, and it has been noted in several of the film's reviews, with Variety's Owen Gleiberman noting its "omnipresence" in the film.

In the movie, Monroe plays a woman returning to her Montana hometown after getting out of prison. In the process of putting her life back together, she meets Withers' character, who drives her around town in his big ol' F-250; at one point, the two main characters enjoy burgers while sitting on the truck's tailgate. (In Hoover's book, Ledger is introduced right alongside his truck: "I love my truck," the character says early in the novel.)

For the production, the vehicle was sourced from a private collector, according to a representative from Universal Pictures, the film's distributor. There was just one vehicle used in the movie, and that same vehicle is the one that appeared at the movie's premiere; a second vehicle, a 1977 F-250, was used on a promo tour for the film. (The studio now owns both vehicles and is housing them in storage, the rep says.)

Ford's Ryan says 29,056 F-250s were produced in 1976, and he estimates less than half are currently in circulation. He says Ford sold about 560,000 F-Series trucks that year; the following year, 1977, is when Ford kicked off its run as the F-Series being the bestselling truck in America.

The F-250, then and now, is a working man's truck, meant to haul things, move cattle, etc. Ryan, who has not yet seen "Reminders of Him," was taken aback by the color of the truck after watching the film's trailer. "Can you imagine a cattleman painting their truck that color orange?" he said.

But he understands its place in the film and what it's meant to represent, and the role that vehicles play in movies when they become their own character.

"Whether it's 'Herbie the Love Bug,' whether it's Elanor (in "Bullitt"), whether it's 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,' they have a role because they create an evocative emotion in the movie," he says. "You can tell the emotion is supposed to be that of longing and passion, and it looks like this particular truck, painted that amazing color, filled that exact role."

©2026 The Detroit News. Visit detroitnews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.