The “asshole” 1982 co-star Harrison Ford wanted fired on the spot: “Only my head would do”
Nobody bats an eyelid when Harrison Ford acts like a grumpy old man, because Harrison Ford is a grumpy old man, but he’s never been malicious about it.
Sure, whenever he’s asked who would win in a fight between Han Solo and Indiana Jones for the millionth time, he’s a lot more likely to fantasise about punching the person who posed the question in the face than dignifying it with an answer, but he’ll never follow through on those urges, as much as he wants to.
He’s never really been known as a hot-headed presence on set, and even though Josh Hartnett alluded to the tension between them on the set of Hollywood Homicide, Ford had no idea he was even part of a feud, with his natural propensity for being a curmudgeon doing most of the heavy lifting on his behalf.
The veteran did have a few disagreements with Brad Pitt while making The Devil’s Own, and Blade Runner was a famously fractious production, but only on one occasion did the Hollywood legend lose his cool and demand that one of his fellow cast members be fired on the spot for their transgressions.
In early 1982, Ford was shooting one of the most important scenes in Return of the Jedi, when Han Solo is defrosted and freed from his Carbonite prison. One of Jabba the Hutt’s henchmen was a weird-looking fucker called Salacious B Crumb, who was voiced by Mark Dodson, but puppeteered on set by Tim Rose, who gained additional fame as Admiral Ackbar by letting everyone know that it was a trap.
When asked about the incident, though, Rose was hardly forthcoming. “No, I could get sued,” he said. “The truth doesn’t matter in lawsuits.” Still, he immediately ignored his own advice and told the story anyway, with Ford “covered in goo” and having his fuse grow increasingly short each time he reshot the scene at director Richard Marquand’s instruction.
On the first take, the assembled aliens mocked the emotional reunion of Han and Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia, at which point Ford “went to the director and pointed out that our screaming would cause problems in the sound edit, and he was right.” On the second take, the puppeteers stayed deathly silent, and with the shot in the can, everybody went for lunch apart from the aliens, “as it would take too long to redress us,” Rose explained.
During the break, the actor forgot his microphone was connected to a loudspeaker, which almost ended disastrously when Marquand came over for a chat. “The take went well, but this Harrison guy, is he going to talk during our laugh? Because it’s really putting me off,” Rose told the filmmaker, while still in character as Crumb, which saw Ford storm off the set and refuse to return until “the asshole who said that was fired off the production.”
“An AD came under the set to tell me that they were going to fire me,” Rose recalled. “I pleaded with him to let me apologise, but he said Mr Ford was furious, and only my head would do.” Fortunately, there was a catch: since nobody could see his face on set, he was allowed to keep his job, but for the rest of Return of the Jedi‘s shooting schedule, the actor playing Salacious Crumb was listed simply as ‘The New Guy’ instead.
