How one phone call made Harrison Ford a superstar: “I walked away with the grand prize”
Ask any movie buff which film made Harrison Ford a superstar, and the chances are they’ll say Star Wars. After all, that beloved 1977 blockbuster cast him as Han Solo, the coolest character in the galaxy far, far away. Prior to George Lucas’ sci-fi extravaganza, Ford had only starred in a handful of supporting roles in the likes of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and Lucas’ American Graffiti.
However, if you ask Ford himself which movie “changed his life”, his answer may come as a surprise. Instead of pinpointing Star Wars as that which altered his course, the actor believes it was his other classic adventure film. You know, the one that came out four years after Star Wars and gave him his second iconic character to return to again and again throughout his long career.
“George Lucas called me up, and he said, ‘I’ve got a script I’m going to send up to your house’,” Ford recalled to the Wall Street Journal in 2025. “I want you to read it, and go over to Steven Spielberg’s house and talk to him for a minute. And I walked away with the grand prize.” Of course, the movie in question was Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the “grand prize” was Dr Henry Jones, more commonly known by his more adventurous moniker, Indiana Jones.
It’s fascinating that, even though he’d played Han Solo twice by the time Raiders came along, Ford still considers his first go-around as the whip-cracking, deadpan archaeologist to be the part that launched him to true superstardom. In truth, though, it’s perhaps not as surprising as it initially seems, what with Ford’s longstanding love-hate relationship with Star Wars, which contrasts completely with more than four decades of saying incredibly nice things anytime anyone has ever asked him about Indiana Jones.
The only truly shocking thing about this scenario is that, right up until the last minute, Ford wasn’t even supposed to play the iconic character in Raiders. Lucas wasn’t sure he wanted to become cinematically synonymous with the actor after making American Graffiti and two Star Wars pictures together, so he initially went in the opposite direction.
“I was wary of Harrison and I becoming like Scorsese and De Niro,” Lucas once told Empire, “I thought, ‘Let’s create a new icon'”.
That icon, as hard as it is to picture now, was Tom Selleck, then the star of Magnum PI. Costume designer Deborah Nadoolman-Landis even made a prototype outfit for Selleck, but when CBS picked up Magnum for another season, Selleck was forced to drop out. Amazingly, though, Lucas was still reticent to approach Ford, despite knowing he’d be perfect for the role, and it took some prodding from Spielberg to set the wheels in motion.
“We were running short of time, and Steven said, ‘There’s always Harrison’,” Lucas remembered. However, he knew how hard it would be to talk Ford into a three-picture deal for Star Wars, and he sincerely doubted the actor would be keen to sign up for yet another one to play Jones. Sensing this hesitation, Spielberg told his pal to call Ford anyway, because the worst that could happen is he’d say “No”.
So, the filmmaker bit the bullet and called Ford, who soon read the script and immediately proclaimed, “Yeah, I’ll do a three-picture deal. I’d love to”. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
