The actor Harrison Ford was right to be worried about: “He thought he might take over the movie”
As one of the biggest, most popular, and iconic movie stars of the modern era, it takes something pretty special to upstage Harrison Ford. Whenever he’s involved in a film, it’s his face that tends to be plastered all over the marketing and used as the number one selling point, making it difficult to shunt him to the sidelines.
Even when he plays a supporting role, as was the case in Jon Favreau’s turgid Cowboys & Aliens, it was the Indiana Jones and Star Wars icon who was dangled in front of audiences like a legendary carrot. It didn’t quite work on that occasion when the sci-fi blockbuster flopped, but it was nonetheless telling that trying to sell the star-studded genre-bender relied more on Ford than it did leading man Daniel Craig.
That said, Ford didn’t play a whole lot of supporting parts during the peak of his leading man years. Whenever he was involved in a project, more often than not, he was the protagonist. That’s not to suggest he wasn’t interested in playing second fiddle, but neither is it ridiculous to think that an A-lister of his calibre was definitely aware that taking centre stage was the better and more beneficial option.
Ironically, Ford was completely blown out of the water by one of his co-stars in a high-stakes action thriller that leaned largely on his persona, baggage, and previous feats of cinematic heroism to lure viewers to their local multiplex. The actor saving and/or avenging his wife and/or family became a subgenre unto itself, making The Fugitive a slam dunk on paper.
A superstar who’d conquered the box office several times over for rescuing his loved ones from mortal peril was once again placed in the immediate crosshairs of danger, this time to convince the people chasing him that he didn’t murder his wife. Ford might have been the lead, but Tommy Lee Jones stole the show in The Fugitive as the dogged federal marshal Samuel Gerard.
Andrew Davis’ propulsive genre flick cleared $300 million in ticket sales and nabbed seven Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’. It’s comfortably one of Ford’s finest performances, but he was shut out of the Oscars conversation, whereas Jones claimed the prize for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
As it turned out, he was concerned about ceding the spotlight to Jones, as Davis revealed to Empire. “Harrison was a little gun-shy about Tommy,” he said. “He thought he might take over the movie. And, well, he did win the Academy Award.”
Make no mistake about it; Ford is great as one-armed man hunter Richard Kimble in The Fugitive. And yet, Jones is inarguably better. Just because he was the star of the show, it didn’t mean he was guaranteed to be the highlight of the movie, as his Oscar-winning scene partner proved.
