From outcast to icon: how Harrison Ford managed to bag his role as Han Solo
There’s a crushing amount of irony to George Lucas being the single most important figure behind Harrison Ford taking his place at the top of the A-list and refusing to come down for almost half a century, simply because at no point did he ever plan on working with him more than once.
Thanks to a rule he tried – and failed miserably – to implement across his most famous productions, the director discovered that no matter how hard he tried to keep Ford at arm’s length, he was the embodiment of the bad penny that kept turning up in the most unexpected of places.
Ford secured one of his earliest breakthroughs when he was cast as Bob Falfa in Lucas’ coming-of-age dramedy American Graffiti, but it didn’t have the desired effect on his acting career despite becoming the most profitable movie ever made at the time and the recipient of five Academy Award nominations including ‘Best Picture’.
When he was piecing together the components for what would eventually become Star Wars, Lucas insisted that he wasn’t going to hire anybody who’d appeared on-screen in his previous feature. That instantly eliminated Ford from the equation, which gave rise to one of Hollywood’s most exhausting casting calls that saw countless future superstars audition for the part of Han Solo.
Ford was at least involved in the pre-production process, but only to read lines with the assorted auditionees. As the process became increasingly exhausting and continuously fruitless, Lucas realised – much to his chagrin, presumably – that there was nobody better suited for the part of the charismatic space smuggler than the last guy he wanted to hire for the gig.
Quite possibly through gritted teeth, Ford was offered the role and accepted, which of course turned him into a household name when Star Wars exploded to become a cultural sensation that shattered dozens of box office benchmarks and won eight Oscars for its groundbreaking visual effects that turned the entire industry upside down.
In essence, Lucas made it patently clear that he wasn’t going to hire any American Graffiti alumni, ended up drafting in an American Graffiti alumni to assist in the deliberations over who made the best candidates to enter a galaxy far, far away, and ultimately hired the American Graffiti alumni when he emerged as the most suitable candidate.
History often has a funny way of repeating itself in Tinseltown, so Lucas must have been borderline apoplectic when the exact same thing happened on Raiders of the Lost Ark. He didn’t want to cast Ford based on the Star Wars connection, but when Tom Selleck’s scheduling conflicts made him unavailable for the first instalment in the legendary franchise, it was almost inevitable it was Ford’s for the taking.
