Harrison Ford Goes Deep on ‘Star Wars,' His First Emmy Nomination for ‘Shrinking' and the Future of America: ‘Rich Get Richer. Poor Get Poorer. That Ain't Right'

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Harrison Ford Goes Deep on 'Star Wars,' His First Emmy Nomination for 'Shrinking' and the Future of America: 'Rich Get Richer. Poor Get Poorer. That Ain't Right'
'Is it just me or does he look like the president of the United States?' That's what Jessica Williams whispered to the producers of 'Shrinking' while she was watching from behind the camera as her co-star Harrison Ford acted in a scene that took place at a formal event. 'And they were like, 'No, that's just what Harrison Ford looks like in a tuxedo, and it's insane.''
On this Monday morning, I'm witnessing the same phenomenon as Ford sits in a photo studio, his black bow tie hanging loose as he holds a paper cup of black coffee as if it were a tumbler of whiskey. His face, still impossibly handsome at 83, conjures up dozens of movie heroes, from Jack Ryan to Indiana Jones, Han Solo to Rick Deckard, to, yes, multiple presidents of the United States.
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Now, after amassing a box office haul of more than $12 billion as one of the highest-grossing movie stars in history, Ford is earning a reputation as a small-screen standout thanks to his performances in Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone prequel '1923' and 'Shrinking,' where he plays Dr. Paul Rhoades, the eccentric senior member of a psychotherapy practice in Pasadena, who has been diagnosed with Parkinson's.
In typical fashion, Ford, who just received his first Emmy nomination and some of the best reviews of his career for 'Shrinking,' downplays the difficulty of the performance.
'I say the words, do the work, rinse and repeat,' he says with his trademark dry humor.
It's grueling work, but Ford has enjoyed one luxury that being part of a streaming series provides. 'We get more time to develop a character over a season than one normally does in a film,' he says.
Of course, Ford has revisited several of his most famous parts throughout his career, returning to play Han Solo nearly 40 years after the first 'Star Wars' movie, as well as Deckard in two 'Blade Runner' movies 35 years apart, and suiting up as Indiana Jones five times across four decades. He didn't come back to those roles for the payday; Ford wanted to examine the consequences of his characters' actions as they aged.
So perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that, at a moment when many of his peers are busy collecting lifetime achievement awards, Ford continues to challenge himself artistically. In 'Shrinking,' he seems looser and more vulnerable than he's ever been.
'He could do an absolutely amazing job caring way less,' his co-star Jason Segel says. 'This guy knows his moves, but he's not content to do his moves. He's creating a character from scratch.' Segel points to the Season 1 episode where Ford delivers an all-out slapstick performance when Paul shows up to a party high on weed gummies; it's evidence of Ford's willingness to go places he's never been. 'I don't think anybody knew that Harrison could do that,' Segel says. 'There was a moment during that episode when he got a giant laugh from the crew, and he walked by me and he whispered in my ear, 'I knew I was fucking funny.''
Segel adds: 'I've never forgotten it, because it affirmed this idea that I had, that we all have these parts of ourselves that we believe are unknown to others, and we want them to be known. I feel like, as a performer, [comedy] is this little corner of the room that Harrison hadn't gotten to show yet.'
The way Ford creates characters is unique, says J.J. Abrams, who worked with him on two 'Star Wars' movies, as well as 'Morning Glory' and 'Regarding Henry.' 'Harrison meets them between who he is and who the character is,' Abrams says. 'It's like he bends the will of the character to be the thing that he brings to it in a way that I don't see other actors do quite so much.'
As he sits across from me, Ford glances at his phone and smiles. He just got a text with the gag reel from 'Shrinking,' which wrapped filming Season 3 two weeks ago. When he presses play by accident, the audio from the clip kicks in, and the room fills with the sound of his castmates cracking each other up.
Ford comes around the table to show me: There's a clip of him on the 'Shrinking' set bursting through the door to the 'Indiana Jones' theme. I don't have to look over my shoulder to know that he's smiling, delighted by the memory of being part of this particular ensemble.
I don't think there's anything competitive about creativity, and I don't understand the need to compare and contrast one person's work to another's. If you like it, you like it; if you don't like it, look at something else.
I'm grateful, but I would have done what I did — and I'll do what I'm doing — regardless of whether it's deemed worthy of mention or not. Because it's what I do. It's what I love doing. I love telling stories. I love pretending to be somebody else.
I don't know whether life is imitating art or art is imitating life, and I don't care. [He laughs.] But it is true that in this case, these people do have warm feelings for each other. You're really living with these people, as well as working with them, and that familiarity either breeds contempt or not — and these people have been wisely chosen to be not contemptible.
It's an additive process. One brick goes on another brick; pretty soon you have a house. But if you don't have a firm foundation, then the whole thing is askew. You're trying to find that place where you can use your honest experience to represent the ideas and the relationships and the elements of the personality of the character. That's like being an item in a recipe. You've got to know what your job is here — am I the onion or am I the tomato?
I think there's humor in everything. Sometimes it's just God's joke. A character that has a sense of humor is a lot more attractive than a character that doesn't. If somebody doesn't have a sense of humor, I don't want to hang out with them. So I try and bring some form of a sense of humor to whatever character I play.
What continues to be added is fuel to the fire, and the fire in his case, right now, is in the Parkinson's department. He knows he's in decline. He knows that he's facing even more difficult physical circumstances than he finds himself in at the moment. He's entering a phase of his life which is a mystery, but he has a partner in the character that Wendie Malick plays. She's going on the journey with him, and so are all of his other colleagues.
Part of what I love about what I'm doing is that I don't know what the writers are going to come up with. And normally it's not something I would do, is take a shot like that. But I did it on '1923' and I did it on this. And it's kind of fun to say, 'Okay, I'll figure out how to do it, even if I don't know what it is.'
Well, they don't take me there. They show me where they want me to go, and then I get myself there. Sometimes I tell them, 'I don't think that works,' but not with any degree of frequency. The way they write for this character is pretty specific, but it's not me.
There are writers on the set, which there are not usually on a movie, unless you're working for a writer-director. They're there to defend their stuff from whatever threat may come, either from the director or from the actors. I call them the 'Poetry Police.'
Because they're there to protect the poetry. Comedy is delicate. You can fuck up a joke by using one word wrong in a 12-word sentence. I kind of like when it doesn't fit my mouth and I have to make it work. It's fun.
It's been essential. Michael's courage, his fortitude and his grace, more than anything else, is on full display. He's very smart, very brave, noble, generous, passionate guy, and an example to all of us, whether we're facing Parkinson's or not. You cannot help but recognize how amazing it is to have such grace.
So he gives me both a physical representation of the disease to inform myself with, but more than that, he allows me to believe that Paul could believe that he could be adequate to the challenge. The truth is that we can't be fucking around with this just to make a joke or anything. Parkinson's is not funny. And I want to get it right. It's necessary to be correct with what we do in respect of the challenge that Parkinson's represents, and that we don't use it for its entertainment value.
I do it on purpose, looking for what matches me and the character. When you're doing a series like this, the writers do begin to write for you, and sometimes they write for you too much. You want to say, 'Stop, guys, I did this already. We've done this. Let's go back to where the story starts, and instead of something that's become a kind of easy way of getting a laugh or an easy way of getting a point across, let's look for another way to do it.'
One time.
Yeah, it was actually 'Witness.' I was flicking through, and I saw me and watched for a minute or two.
Young.
The role was fantastic. I got to work with Peter Weir. What I loved about the movie was that we had a very, very short period of preproduction. Peter knew nothing of the Amish, so he went away to learn about the Amish, and I went away to research the police. And we came back together two weeks after that and discussed what we learned. And that was included in the rewrite. I love that kind of tension that we were under — we didn't really have the script entirely figured out, so we left a couple of big holes in it when we started. I felt really good about the film we were making, and the film was quite a success.
To the nomination, Peter and I were working on 'The Mosquito Coast' at the time, so neither of us were able to be part of the ceremony. So it's kind of like it never happened. We watched it on TV on the boat I was living on in Belize. It didn't matter to me whether I won, but I was pleased that the performance was recognized.
I was under contract to Columbia Pictures at the time for $150 a week and all the respect that that implies. I was called into the office of the head of the new talent program, and he told me that I had no future in the business. Which was OK. And then he asked me to get my hair cut like Elvis Presley. That I didn't go along with.
He thought that 'Harrison Ford' was too pretentious a name for a young man.
I met him later, across a crowded dining room. He sent me a card on which he'd written, 'I missed my guess.' I looked around, couldn't remember which one he was, but then he nodded at me and smiled, and I thought, 'Oh yeah, I know you.'
I'd been to college, and I hadn't made a success of my academic career. At the beginning of my junior year, I looked for something in the course catalog that would help me get my grade point average up, and I came across drama. The first line of the paragraph that described the course said, 'You read and discuss plays,' and I thought, 'I can do that.' I didn't read all the description — typical of me in those days — because the last few lines described that the course also required you to be part of the school plays for that academic year. I hadn't ever done anything like that before, so I was shocked by that part of it.
But I quickly recognized that I loved telling stories. I liked dressing up and pretending to be somebody else. And the people that I met had a similar bent, people that I might have overlooked. They're people that probably hadn't been really seen before, for who they are, for what they were — and they were storytellers.
No, it made me feel truly unseen. Because I was able to hide behind the character, and that was the first freedom I really felt.
A lot of actors came out of that show, and I thought it was remarkable the way George [Lucas] used music in that film; it was a rare use of contemporary music. That movie was fun to make. It was made very, very cheaply. I do remember I was almost fired for taking two doughnuts instead of my deserved one.
I didn't think he could speak. He never spoke. I remember there was an interview for the part that I was eventually given, and he was the only guy in the room that didn't talk. I later realized he didn't like to talk very much, but he did when necessary.
I was supposed to say, 'I love you too,' and I thought that was a little un-Han Solo-ish. I thought it was a little banal. So I said no, and [director] Irvin Kershner agreed with me. George, when he saw it, was not so sure, and made me sit next to him at the screening of the film the first time we ran it for an audience. They laughed, but it was a good laugh, so we kept it in. Thank you, George.
I didn't really know whether there was going to be another film when we started, and because I didn't know whether there would be another film — and because I only had the script from the first one to consider — I didn't sign the sequel deal, which turned out to be to all of our advantage.
I had a special relationship with both of them. Carrie had a very inspired wit and very special manner. She's also very smart, very funny. Both of them were dear friends — are dear friends.
I played a character that I named myself. He wore his name proudly on his uniform. The name was L-U-C-A-S, Lucas. I played a small part, an American soldier who gives Captain Willard [Martin Sheen] the assignment to kill Colonel Kurtz [Marlon Brando]. I play a very nervous guy with a funny haircut. I went down to the Philippines and shot my part of it right after one of the 'Star Wars' movies, and when George Lucas first saw the movie, he didn't know the character was me, even though he was named Lucas. An Easter egg, I now understand it to be.
You're talking about a very exciting time in the movie business. In the late '70s and through the '80s, there was this group of young filmmakers, all of them wildly independent, both in spirit and in mind, who wanted to make their own films their own way, and they all burst upon the scene at much the same time. I was very lucky to lump in with those guys because I was of a youthful age. But I never expected to be anything more than a character actor. I never wanted to be anything more than somebody that made a living as an actor.
I had the best time with him. He's not the Billy Goat Gruff that everybody thinks he is — and neither am I. He asked me to play tennis with him, and I hadn't played tennis much before. In fact, not at all. I was able to serve the ball, but I hit him in the back two times with a serve — much to his amusement.
But when we got into the motorcycle with the sidecar, he really began to give me trouble; he thought he was more qualified to drive than I was. I think I proved him wrong.
Well, I wanted to see him as an older man facing the consequences of the life that he had lived. But I couldn't imagine that we were going to end up doing five of them. I didn't expect success. In the movie business, you always go in wanting to be successful, but you don't always expect to be.
I did expect the first film would be wildly successful. I read it very quickly, one time. I'd been asked by George Lucas to go and meet Steven Spielberg, who I didn't know, and he sent me a script to read. I thought it was great. And then I went to meet Steven, we spent about an hour together and suddenly I had a job.
That was an extraordinary experience. We shot for 50 nights in rain — most times, we were outside. It was sort of miserable to make, but it holds its own.
I like any cut without the voice-over. When we first saw the film in script form, it had a narration. I felt strongly that the narration was not right for the film — I played a detective, and I really talked about the detective part of my job, but I didn't appear to be doing it. So Ridley, the screenwriter, a producer and I spent three weeks at my dining room table taking the information that was in the voice-overs and making it part of the scene experience.
And then at the end of the film, Warner Bros. said, 'What the hell is going on here? I don't understand this at all. Explain it.' And the voice-over came back. I did the voice-over about six times, and nobody was ever happy with it. So I was glad that the film was finally released without it, which I think encourages the audience to be present in the story.
I enjoyed the experience of making the second 'Blade Runner' — to be fair, even more than I did the first one, because it wasn't raining and it wasn't night all the time.
[We were rehearsing a fight] and we got too close and I hit him. I apologized right away. What more could I do? Can't take back a punch. Just take it. He's a very handsome man. He's still very handsome.
Did it have an impact? I suppose it did. I've been through a couple of big accidents that took a while to heal from. This is not something dismissed lightly, but shit happens; it was a mechanical issue that was judged to be beyond my control. If I'd been at fault, I would have taken another direction. But I don't think it informs my life on a day-to-day basis now that I've recovered sufficiently from the physical effects.
No.
No. I knew they weren't going to like that one. [He cracks up.] I always used to think, 'I'll do one for me and one for them.'
Fine.
The pendulum doth swing in both directions, and it's on a healthy swing to the right at the moment. And, as nature dictates, it will swing back.
But currently the issue is not who we are, but that we're not who we used to be because we've been purposefully disaggregated into serviceable political units. And that has caused the middle to become frayed and tenuous, and the middle is where we belong. Not because it's banal and safe, but because it's fair. Compromise is fair and honest.
In politics and in life, you don't always get what you want, but you get what you get and you don't get upset. They teach us that in kindergarten, but they also teach you to fight for what you think is right.
Now, because we've been disaggregated in this way, we're having a hard time finding commonality. But if you look at the economy, you'll figure out where the commonality is — it's where it always was: Rich get richer, and poor get poorer. And that ain't exactly right.
You're asking an unqualified person. So I don't have that answer.
If we get to work together, we'd want it to be someone else's idea. That kind of casting might not be the best way to bring people into an imagined situation, because [audiences] may say, 'Oh, I know they're married; now I'm not even thinking about the movie anymore.'
Nope.
No. That's one of the things I thought was attractive about the job of an actor, was that they need old people, too, to play old people's parts.
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