The one actor Harrison Ford said was out of his league: “It was impossible to see him act”
Few actors have ever been less interested in playing favourites than Harrison Ford, but even the industry’s most famous grumpy old man was forced to admit there was one performer he could never dream of being as good as, no matter how hard he tried.
In his defence, it’s that ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude that’s helped endear him to the masses as one of Hollywood’s most iconic stars of the last half-century. Ask him who’d win in a fight between Indiana Jones and Han Solo, and he’s more likely to punch you in the face than even consider giving you an answer.
Ask him if he’s got a performance in his back catalogue that he’d call a personal favourite, and he’ll say that he won’t. However, dig a little deeper, and you’ll find that if he was held at gunpoint and forced to choose, it would either be the intrepid, fedora-wearing archaeologist, or The Mosquito Coast‘s Allie Fox.
Ask him if he’s got a certain movie that he holds closer to his heart than the rest, and again, he’ll say that he won’t. Force 10 from Navarone is about the only one he’s openly denigrated, but the Star Wars veteran wouldn’t dream of placing any picture that he’s made on a pedestal above any others.
With that in mind, Ford wouldn’t even go so far as to say he’s got a favourite film of all time. However, there’s one that comes about as close to the summit as possible without the actor going out on a limb and calling it such, which is as good as saying that Robert Mulligan’s 1962 masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird, takes the top spot.
Instead of saying it’s his favourite, which it basically is, he called it the “one film to which I had a very strong reaction and can vividly remember how I felt,” which is pretty much the same thing. Unsurprisingly, that also makes Gregory Peck the closest thing he had to an idol, and an actor who continued to mesmerise him, no matter how many times he watched the film.
“I think he was remarkable,” Ford explained. “It was impossible to see him act; he just didn’t do it. He brought truth and vivid storytelling to the screen, but I don’t think he was so much interested in performance as he was in storytelling. I admired him greatly.”
Peck’s Academy Award-winning performance is one of the greatest in the history of American cinema, and if Ford had played his cards right, he could have co-starred with his hero. Martin Scorsese offered him the role of Sam Bowden in his Cape Fear remake, but he turned it down because he wanted to play Max Cady instead.
After he declined the part, Nick Nolte was cast, and who did he share the screen with in the movie? None other than Gregory Peck, who made a cameo appearance as Lee Heller, paying tribute to the original that he starred in, in what was also his final outing on the big screen.
