LOS ANGELES — Over the course of 20 months and in the midst of a pandemic, Harrison Ford filmed a sequel to “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in England. He shot a 10-part comedy, Shrinking, in Burbank. He drove cattle up a mountain in sub-zero temperatures in Montana for “1923,” the latest prequel to the hit western series “Yellowstone.”
He also celebrated his 80th birthday.
“I pretty much worked back-to-back, which isn’t what I normally do,” said Ford, unshaven, dressed in jeans and boots and relaxing in a chair at the Luxe Sunset Boulevard Hotel here earlier this month. He was in Los Angeles overnight for the premiere of “1923,” which debuts Sunday on Paramount+. From here it was off to Las Vegas the next morning for the next screening, yet another stop after a long streak of filming, travel, and promotion that would exhaust an actor half his age.
“I don’t know how it happened,” Ford said, taking a sip from his cup of coffee. “But it happened.”
It’s been 45 years since Ford jumped off the screen as Han Solo in the first ‘Star Wars’ movie, laying the foundations for a blockbuster career that saw him personify some of the most commercially successful movie franchises in movie history . He has appeared in over 70 films, with a combined worldwide box office gross of over $9 billion. By now it seems he has nothing left to prove.
But at an age when many of his contemporaries have faded from public view, Ford isn’t slowing down, let alone stepping back to spend more time on his farm in Jackson, Wyo. He’s still trying new things – “1923” represents his first major television part – still looking for another role, still driven to stay in front of the camera.
“I love it,” he said. “I love the challenge and the process of making a movie. I feel at home. That’s what I’ve been doing all my life.”
And why would he slow down? Ford shows no signs of fading, physically or mentally — he was smooth and nimble when he stepped into the Luxe for our interview, with his cap down, and later, as he worked the room at the post-premiere party at the Hollywood restaurant MotherWolf. In his pacing and eclectic choice of roles, including the weathered and tired farmer Jacob Dutton from ‘1923’, he seems determined as ever to show he can be more than just the swashbuckling action hero who gave the world Han Solo and Indiana Jones. .
“He can rest on his laurels: he doesn’t have to work financially,” said Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars” and who, at age 71, remembered the 5 a.m. wake-up calls and the hassle don’t miss for the next roll. “To do another ‘Indiana Jones’ – I’m in awe of him.”
Ford is known for being gruff and unresponsive, an actor who lacks introspection and has little patience for “put me on the couch” questions. There were flashes of that during our 45 minutes together. “I know I walked into that dark alley myself where you’ll now have to ask me to describe the character,” he said at one point. “And I do not want that.”
But for the most part, Ford was affectionate, relaxed, and contemplative. This was a promotional tour and after half a century in the business he knows how to do it. “I’m here to sell a movie,” Ford said, though of course he was there to sell a TV show—and, to some extent, himself.
“I don’t want to reinvent myself,” he said. “I just want to work.”
FORD ALWAYS WAS more than just a charismatic Hollywood action star. He could act. There was the swagger and grin, but they were deployed to represent complex heroes with flaws and self-doubt, including John Book, the detective in “Witness”; Jack Ryan, the CIA analyst at the center of the Tom Clancy novels that inspired the movies; and Rick Deckard, battling bioengineered humanoids in “Blade Runner.”
That style set him apart from monosyllabic, muscular action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude Van Damme throughout much of his career, and it’s always been an integral part of his appeal: Hamill said he was struck by it the first time she performed together.
“He was impossibly cool, world-weary, wary, a little snarky, flippant,” Hamill said.
Television isn’t entirely new territory for Ford. When George Lucas cast him as a drag racer wearing a white cowboy hat in the 1973 movie “American Graffiti,” Ford was 30 and making a living as a part-time carpenter in Los Angeles. By then, he had already taken on modest roles since the late 1960s on series such as ‘Ironside’, ‘The Virginian’ and ‘Gunsmoke’.
His role in ‘1923’ is anything but humble: John Dutton III’s great-great-grand-uncle, the patriarch of the family played by Kevin Costner in ‘Yellowstone’, TV’s most popular drama. As with “Yellowstone,” the scope of “1923” is vast – the western vistas, the sweeping aerial shots, the complexity of the characters and their stories. It also features another big star, Helen Mirren, as his wife, Cara, the tough matriarch of the family.
Ford doesn’t watch much television – he said he doesn’t have time – and he knew little about “Yellowstone” when his agent first brought him the part. (In preparation, he watched a portion of “1883,” the first prequel to “Yellowstone,” which follows an earlier generation of Duttons as they travel west by covered wagon to establish the family farm.) Based on preliminary screening of the pilot, the cinematic ambitions of “1923” would be familiar to anyone who has seen “Game of Thrones” or “Breaking Bad”. But they have been a pleasant surprise to Ford for the past four months.
“They keep calling it television,” Ford said, twisting his torso to point at a television screen in the next room. “But it’s so untelevised. It’s, you know, a huge view. It’s an incredibly ambitious story that he tells on an epic scale. The scale of the thing is huge, I think for television.”
Ford said he agreed to the role after Taylor Sheridan, the lead creator behind the “Yellowstone” franchise, took him to his ranch outside Fort Worth and sketched the character. (“I’m 80, and I’m playing 77,” Ford said with a wry grin. “It’s a bit long-winded.”) Ford was intrigued by Dutton, a stoic and morose farmer who has spent the last years of his life fighting for his protect country and family.
“The character isn’t the usual character for me,” Ford said, comparing it to his role as a psychiatrist with Jason Segel in “Shrinking,” created by Segel and Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein (of “Ted Lasso”), who debuts next. month on Apple TV+. “I’ve never been to a psychiatrist in my life.”
Filming “1923” tested his resilience and his love of the craft. Montana proved to be an unforgiving place to work; the cast and crew faced blinding snowstorms and staggeringly cold temperatures for 10-hour days that were almost entirely outdoors.
“It was a nightmare,” says Timothy Dalton, a former James Bond who plays a farmer who challenges Ford for control of the land. “We are on top of a hill and a strong wind is coming at us. The cameras freeze. Freeze your toes.”
Ben Richardson, who directed most of the episodes of “1923,” described how he filmed Ford riding horses up steep mountains, against razor-sharp winds, as Dutton drove cattle to higher elevations and the promise of fields to graze.
“I’ve never had a complaint from him,” said Richardson. “I can’t express how much of a team player he is – to the point where it’s shocking. He’s Harrison Ford. He could do anything. I’m sure there are people who would rather have a double. He didn’t. ” He added that he had probably seen “Blade Runner” 20 times, studying how Ford presented himself on screen.
“There’s something really compelling about watching him deal with difficult situations,” he said.
From Ford’s earliest days as Han Solo, he was wary of being labeled as a go-to action hero. He agreed to do the blockbusters urged on by a Lucas or Steven Spielberg, but he also sought more than laser guns and bullwhips, drawn to films like Peter Weir’s “Witness” (1985), and directors like Alan J. Pakula (“Presumed Innocent,” “The Devil’s Own”).
“I always went from a movie for me to a movie for them,” he said, referring to directors — and audiences — having a penchant for action-hero blockbusters. “I don’t want to work for just one target group.”
That’s how Ford plays a farmer in “1923” and a therapist in “Shrinking” — six months before his fifth “Indiana Jones” movie, “The Dial of Destiny,” premieres in June.
“He doesn’t get credit for the diversity of choices he made,” Hamill said. “Everybody loves ‘Indiana Jones,’ but we know what it is, and we’ve seen it before — he could do that for the rest of his life. The fact that he’s doing something more challenging and more thought-provoking is something that I admire in him.”
A CENTRAL PARADOX of Ford’s biography is that ‘Star Wars’, the franchise arguably most responsible for reshaping the industry in his image, made him one of the last true movie stars, a man whose name alone could sell tickets; Hollywood’s shift from star vehicles to intellectual property, from big screen to small, can now be traced neatly over the arc of his career.
“Star Wars” united a nation – crossing geographic, class and political boundaries – and captivated audiences who gathered in theaters to share in its fairytale story of love and adventure. Today, the audience is friends and family gathered in a living room, and Ford is faced with whether the “Yellowstone” franchise is a paean to Red America.
“I’m aware of the characters’ interest in politics,” he said, adding that he had no interest in Jacob Dutton’s political beliefs. (Ford, who was born in Chicago to Democratic parents and supported Joe Biden against Donald Trump in 2020, suggested that the audience for “Yellowstone” was so large that it was unlikely to consist of Republicans alone.)
When Ford started working on “1923,” Sheridan told him to approach it as if it were 10 o’clock movies. “And that’s how it feels to me,” Ford said. ‘But we work at a television pace. There’s something about movies that, you know, kind of, you know, kind of a luxury of time and a certain…”
He hesitated as he considered the risks of a road better left untaken, of Harrison Ford balancing movies and television. “I don’t think I really want to get too deep into this, because there’s no place to go with it, for me.”
“I do the same job,” he said. “It’s just packaged and distributed in a different way.”
Ford is not a pioneer. He resisted television for years, and when he finally gave in, he followed other major box office stars – Kevin Costner on “Yellowstone” and Sylvester Stallone on “Tulsa King” – who have joined Taylor Sheridan’s television productions.
But as he prepared to attend the premiere of “1923,” on a big screen tucked away in an American Legion Hall in Hollywood, it was clear where his heart was.
“The most important thing is going into a dark room with strangers, experiencing the same thing and having a chance to reflect on your common humanity,” Ford said. “With strangers. And the music – the sound system is better, isn’t it? The dark is deeper, isn’t it? And the cooler isn’t that close.
Ford paused at his revealing reference to a kitchen appliance from another era – the one he grew up in. He couldn’t help but laugh at his mistake. “Ice Box!” he said.