The one line Harrison Ford refused to say: “Are we pissing away this great opportunity?”
Masterfully skirting the line between being a grumpy old man without devolving into full-blown yelling-at-clouds territory, Harrison Ford has settled nicely into his groove as Hollywood’s elder statesman of not giving a fuck.
Being an A-list superstar for almost half a century will do that to anybody, with the actor comfortable in the knowledge that he’s one of American cinema’s greatest screen icons, placing him in the position where he’s able to say whatever the hell he wants about anything and people will celebrate him for it.
Why did he decide that he wanted to become the latest legend to board the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Because it looked like fun, and he doesn’t mind being an idiot for money. Would Han Solo beat Indiana Jones in a fight or vice versa? It’s probably best not to ask him that because it’s a surefire way to bring out his curmudgeonly side.
It’s not that Ford despises his association with Star Wars; it’s more that he’s beyond fed up with being asked highly specific questions about a galaxy far, far away that he doesn’t give a shit about. That’s not a new thing, either, with the star repeatedly voicing his frustrations with George Lucas’ subpar screenwriting while shooting the original trilogy in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
He’s been bitching about Blade Runner for just as long, too, so there’s always been an air of abject misery between the performer and his most iconic characters. However, he was definitely correct when he refused to say a line scripted by Lucas in The Empire Strikes Back, which ended up becoming one of the most famous soundbites in not only Ford’s career but all of Star Wars.
“What’s the last thing a woman wants to hear when she says ‘I love you?'” Ford asked entirely rhetorically. “She says, ‘I love you’, and I say, ‘I know’. George had artfully contrived for Han Solo to say, ‘I love you too’. I thought it was a lost opportunity. This character never behaved so unabashedly emotional and conventional before, and I thought, ‘Are we pissing away this great opportunity for the character?'”
Han Solo was a charismatic rogue who’d never wear his heart on his sleeve, so a simple declaration of love wasn’t going to cut it in Ford’s eyes. He wanted to remain true to the character’s established personality, or in his words: “You want your badasses to be a badass, you want them to go down the way they lived.”
Looking at how deeply the line has become seared into the pop culture consciousness, not to mention its status as one of the most memorable exchanges in Ford’s entire career, it would be an understatement to say that he was right and Lucas was wrong when they butted heads about how Han would respond to Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia laying her feelings bare.
