Imagine for a moment that you are Harrison Ford in the year 2024. You are 82 years old, and arguably one of the last living old-school movie stars, held aloft above an army of actors whose names don’t get people to buy tickets. You’re Han Solo. You’re Rick Deckard. You’re Indiana Jones, for crying out loud. How do you navigate through life with a legacy like that?
Some actors at this point would yank up the drawbridge and rest on their laurels. And who could blame them? They’ve earned their money. They’ve achieved immortality. Any more work on top of that would simply undermine all they’ve forged. Say what you like about Gene Hackman, but at least he’s never going to junk his reputation by coming out of retirement to appear in, say, Dirty Grandpa.
But this is not the path that Harrison Ford has chosen. Because right now Harrison Ford is everywhere. Last year he made his fifth Indiana Jones film. This week he’ll reprise his role as a cranky therapist on Apple TV’s Shrinking. He’s just finished filming the second season of the blockbuster western 1923, and next year he’s joining the MCU, pulling double duty as both the president of America and a literal Hulk.
Ford’s relentless work ethic came up during an interview with Vanity Fair recently. “What do you get out of acting nowadays?” he was asked. His response: “Oh man, I get out of it essential human contact.”
There was more to it than that – he went on to say that he enjoys working with talented people – but the crux of it simply seems to be that working gets him out of the house. Sitting and festering is for other people. He’s a doer.
The result of this is that Ford is now doing work that pushes at the limits of his legacy. The most recent Indiana Jones might not have set the box office alight, but it let him tell a story about what happens to heroes when they get older and punch a bunch of Nazis in the face in the digitally de-aged prologue. 1923 saw him test the boundaries of his trademark gruffness over a long-form format. Shrinking is the most charming thing on television at the moment, in part thanks to Ford’s willingness to cut loose. And even if the next Captain America fails to restore the MCU to its former glory, there’s something extremely giddy about the thought of Harrison Ford running around in a mo-cap suit hulking out like he did that time at Comic-Con.
There’s now a looseness to Ford that hasn’t always been there. For a while his reputation was that of a hunched and grumpy recluse who couldn’t quite find his place. He made action films like Firewall and Paranoia that aimed to be throwbacks but ended up drifting dangerously close to straight-to-DVD fare. In interviews he was guarded and brittle, and perhaps a little lost. In retrospect, this hesitance seems to stem from a desire to protect his legacy. Watching him back then was like watching a boxer in the 12th-round, trying to last the course in the vain hope that he’d be able to snatch a win on points.
What a difference to today. The reason why he is working so much at the moment is because he has stopped gripping the reins so tightly. If your motivation to work is to simply be around people, that means you get to do whatever you want. It doesn’t matter if you fail or not, because that isn’t the reason you entered into it.
It’s paying off, too. Especially on Shrinking, which is so warm and endearing that you hope they never stop making it, Ford has never seemed so relaxed. He was always respected, but now he is beloved. And all because of basic human contact. Who knew?
