Harrison Ford on action scenes, Indiana Jones’ final fling and what he really thought of Star Wars
Harrison Ford has entered his ninth decade by saying one last goodbye to Indiana Jones and reveals why he wanted to stay in the thick of the action.
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Harrison Ford was approaching his 39th birthday when Raiders of the Lost Ark was released 1981. Four movies later and more than twice that age, he’s saying goodbye to Indiana Jones for the last time.
A later bloomer by Hollywood standards, Ford was already a huge star thanks to his wisecracking space pirate Han Solo in Star Wars, but donning the signature leather jacket, fedora and bullwhip to play the treasure-hunting, swashbuckling archaeologist for the first time sent him into the stratosphere.
Raiders and its three sequels to date – The Temple of Doom (1984), The Last Crusade (1989) and even the critically unloved Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – were all huge hits, making more than $2 billion at the box office and enshrining Indy as one of cinema’s best loved characters. Indeed, an Empire magazine poll in 2015 voted him as the greatest movie character of all time, ahead of James Bond.
In the original film, a battered and bruised Indy moaned that “it ain’t the years, honey, it’s the mileage” but preparing for his 81st birthday next month, Ford has turned back the clock for a fifth and final adventure, The Dial of Destiny, which opens around the world this week after its world premiere at Cannes last month.
Not only has Ford been digitally de-aged for a rousing World War II set sequence that opens the film, he also retains a resilience, robustness and enthusiasm of a man half his age. Though he plays a septuagenarian on the brink of retirement for most of the movie, set in 1969 with Indy pondering his place and purpose in the space age, Ford was as keen to get involved in the frenetic and fantastical stunts for which the franchise is so well known – as long as it was plausible on at least some level.
“I only wanted to be in the action scenes as a 77-year-old man,” says Ford over Zoom call from Los Angeles.
“I wanted not to be the Indiana Jones from Raiders. I wanted to be the Indiana Jones that you saw right in front of your face.”
After finding new nuance in the swan songs of his celebrated characters Han Solo in The Force Awakens and Rick Deckard in Blade Runner 2049, age was the main reason Ford wanted Indiana Jones to have one last ride.
He’d been asking series creators George Lucas and Steven Spielberg for years about rounding out the journey that began more than 40 years ago by acknowledging and having fun with Indy in his twilight years “using all of what we had woven together before and then adding on to it something that was very interesting”.
“Age has taken its toll but wisdom has been acquired,” says Ford. “Experience has been acquired and it’s a different Indy. It’s the same armature but his history has shaped him.
“And now he’s at a point where he’s no longer an adventurer – he’s an academic teaching archaeology and studying the past with students who care only about the future, about the newest thing, about landing on the moon.
“He’s a fish out of water. He’s dispirited. He’s got no job anymore. His family is fragmented and along comes this opportunity for one last adventure. It’s imposed on him but we see him rise revivified and the pleasure for the audience of seeing this guy acquire his original vigour, I think is one of the one of the beautiful things about the way the script is written.”
In a separate interview, James Mangold, who stepped into the directing shoes of Spielberg (who opted to make his deeply personal The Fabelmans instead, but remained heavily involved as a producer and sounding board) marvels at his evergreen leading man. Mangold, who had produced Ford’s 2020 adventure The Call of the Wild, says he was mindful and “protective” of Ford’s advancing years, “but the reality is he’s eager to do almost anything”.
“He is in great shape,” says Mangold. “Before I even saw him coming out of the makeup trailer in the morning, he often had already ridden his bike for 20km before starting the day’s work. So you’re dealing with someone who’s in great shape and, honestly, who doesn’t weigh one pound more than he weighed when he was 35 years old. And so it made a great match when he was playing himself younger in the film, but he’s also in incredible shape in every way – mentally, physically and in his spirit.”
After decades as one of the most reliable and bankable leading men ever, Ford is in something of a purple patch, even by his lofty standards. In addition to his Indy swan song and joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the coming Captain America movie Brave New World, (taking over the role of General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross from the late William Hurt) he’s also producing some of the best work of his career on the small screen.
His hilarious and touching turn as a psychiatrist with Parkinson’s disease in Shrinking is likely to earn him his first Emmy nomination as Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series and he’s also a good shot for a nod in the Best Actor Drama category for his gruff, steely cattle baron in the Yellowstone prequel, 1923.
In a reflective mood as he looks back over his long and phenomenally successful career, he admits that he has exceeded his own expectations and that he never thought he’d be a leading man. It seems strangely fitting that he’s having such a moment on TV right now given that when he was working as a carpenter before he hit the big time, his scale of his ambition was to be a working actor.
“I really was just hoping I could make a living as an actor and not have to supplement my income with some other side hustle,” he recently told People magazine. “I thought I would be lucky to have a character part on a regular TV show.”
Even after all this time, he’s still grateful to Lucas, who cast him his in breakthrough part in American Graffiti and then made him an A-lister in Star Wars. While he hoped that the classic storytelling tropes he saw in the trailblazing space opera would make it successful, he says he had no idea at the time that it would become a cultural phenomenon that continues to resonate nearly half a century later. If he had known, he jokes, “I would have run away”.
“Even as odd as it might have seemed to the British crew when we were making the first Star Wars, like ‘there’s a seven foot tall man in a dog suit, there’s a princess, what’s going on here?’ – but I thought ‘this is a fairy tale’,” he recalls.
“This kind of story has always been successful. Whether it’s a written fairy tale or a filmed one – there is a wise old warrior, there is a callow youth, there’s a beautiful princess, and there’s a smartass. I knew my part. It was fun. It didn’t matter to me, at that point in my career, that the film be hugely successful and change movie history but I was grateful and it changed my life.”
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny opens in cinemas on June 29.
Originally published as Harrison Ford on action scenes, Indiana Jones’ final fling and what he really thought of Star Wars
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