The movies Harrison Ford was “seduced” into making: “I haven’t initiated any of those”
Cinema’s grumpiest old man doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do, but as it turns out, Harrison Ford can be “seduced” into making a movie if someone makes a come-hither approach.
Obviously, there’s more to it than that. Plenty of people within the industry would love nothing more than sidling up to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones icon and fluttering their eyelashes to convince him to sign on for a movie or TV show, but it takes a little more than that to get him onside.
Money always helps, as Ford admitted after joining the Marvel Studios roster for Captain America: Brave New World, where he spent a fair chunk of his screentime as a red monster made of CGI. He didn’t make that film for pennies on the dollar, and he hasn’t come cheap for a long time.
If anything, though, he’s been expanding his horizons as he’s gotten older. Back in the day, a star on Ford’s level wouldn’t be caught dead on TV, but 1923 and Shrinking lured him back to the small screen for the first time in decades, and it wouldn’t be hyperbolic to say that both shows rank among the best work of his career from a performative standpoint.
He was even convinced to make three legacy sequels that saw him reprise his trio of most iconic roles, which he claimed wasn’t his idea. Ford thought he was done with Star Wars forever after Return of the Jedi and never expected Rick Deckard to return, with Indiana Jones the only character he was even remotely interested in playing again.
“I haven’t initiated any of those efforts,” he said, referring to JJ Abrams’ The Force Awakens, Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, and James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. “I’ve been seduced into most of those circumstances… willingly.”
Unlike many A-listers and world-renowned actors, Ford has never been interested in expanding his influence beyond the four corners of the silver screen. Extraordinary Measures and K-19: The Widowmaker are the only two films he’s ever made where he was credited as a behind-the-scenes figure, and they were only executive producer credits.
“I don’t create, I’m not a producing actor, I don’t produce films,” he explained. “I feed opportunistically on what’s available, and sometimes I reach outside of my usual diet for something, and it’s always been fun to be able ot do that. And I think that’s the natural mindset of an actor.” The major difference is that he’s Harrison Ford, so he’s hardly been feeding on scraps for the last five decades.
It’s been a long time since he’s had to do anything he didn’t want to do, Star Wars and Blade Runner among them. He’s always had a soft spot for the fedora-wearing archeologist, but Han Solo and Deckard were the furthest thing from his mind for years until Abrams and Villeneuve came along, gave him their most seductive sell-job, and convinced him to come in from the cold.
