Harrison Ford names his two least likeable characters: “A whole different kind of prick”
Harrison Ford has always been an expert at playing capable, slightly arrogant, yet well-meaning characters who have chinks in their armour that somehow make them insanely likeable. Han Solo falls nicely into this category, as does Indiana Jones, and he ploughed a similar furrow in Witness, The Fugitive, and Air Force One, establishing something akin to a classic Ford character.
Throughout his career, though, Ford has peppered in a few characters who weren’t concerned with being likeable at all. For example, his philandering lawyer, Rozat ‘Rusty’ Sabich, in Presumed Innocent inadvertently causes his lover’s death and then covers up her murder, and in Morning Glory, he’s a sexist, verbally abusive news anchor who dismisses the idea of working with a female producer.
Having said that, Ford reckons he has played two other characters who would win an unpopularity contest, should such a thing exist. The first was Allie Fox in 1986’s The Mosquito Coast, an inventor who moves his entire family to the Central American jungle to live a simpler life. However, when this dream turns sour and he discovers it is more complicated than he imagined to build a utopian existence in a foreign land, his behaviour turns dangerously erratic, with even his wife and kids becoming scared of him.
When Ford spoke to Ain’t It Cool News in 2010 about Extraordinary Measures, another movie in which he played a morally questionable character, he was reminded of The Mosquito Coast and quipped, “That was the last time I played a guy that was a bit of a prick.”
When The Mosquito Coast was released, it became the first Ford picture to flop at the box office, and it’s been argued that audiences simply weren’t ready to see him play an unlikeable character. They loved him as a swashbuckling hero who was always ready with a weary one-liner, but had little desire to see him play a stubborn, self-important man endangering his family and being pushed to his emotional and physical limits.
Ford, though, always stuck by the movie and insisted he was happy he made it. “If there was a fault with the film, it was that it didn’t fully enough embrace the language of the book,” he told Entertainment Weekly, referring to the source novel by Paul Theroux. “It may have more properly been a literary rather than a cinematic exercise. But I think it’s full of powerful emotions.”
Interestingly, the second least likeable character in Ford’s career is his only out-and-out villain – or, as Ford put it, “a whole different kind of prick”.
In Robert Zemeckis’ 2000 horror thriller, What Lies Beneath, he inhabited the manipulative, sinister persona of Dr Norman Spencer, a man who gaslights his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) when she begs him to believe her that their house is haunted by the ghost of a woman who looks unnervingly like her. Of course, it is eventually revealed that Spencer murdered this woman when she threatened to expose a sordid affair they were having. Then, to stop his wife from spilling the beans, Spencer doubles down on villainy by drugging her and attempting to stage a fake suicide.
In truth, this character goes well beyond ‘unlikeable’ and into ‘absolutely despicable’ territory, but it can’t be denied that there is a certain thrill in seeing Ford embrace such a vicious, evil role. It was a clever choice by the star at the time, too, as he had exhausted the well of good guys, but knew audiences could only view him one way. So, when the awful turn comes and Spencer is revealed as a murderer, it truly shocks people to their core.
