“I don’t reject him”: the only time Harrison Ford played a character he called a “monster”
Obviously, Harrison Ford has played a literal monster, and very recently. He hasn’t played many figurative ones, though, and there’s only one character he ever described as such.
After replacing William Hurt as Thaddeus Ross in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ford got his literal monster. We can all cross our fingers in the hopes that the behind-the-scenes footage will be made available one day, because the thought of the grumpiest man in Hollywood wearing a motion capture leotard and pretending to be a muscular red creature would be a sight to behold.
He also played a villain for the first time in Robert Zemeckis’ psychological chiller, What Lies Beneath. That said, his Norman Spencer was more of a manipulator than a monster, not to mention a murderer, with the actor describing him as a “whole different kind of prick.” Evil? Yes. A monster? Not quite.
That leaves the other time the typically clean-cut leading man flaunted his dark side, in Peter Weir’s The Mosquito Coast. The 1986 literary adaptation was a challenge that Ford was happy to meet, and seeing one of the industry’s most prominent heroes breaking bad was too much for audiences to bear, since the picture flopped at the box office.
Still, he regards it as one of his best performances and the part he’s proudest of, which must stick in the craw of those lifelong Star Wars fans who keep bombarding him with questions he doesn’t want to answer. Allie Fox is a complicated fellow, and to gain a better understanding of the character, he was forced to embrace his inner ghoul.
“I’m aware of the fact that he’s part monster,” he acknowledged to Todd Webb. “But there are also mitigating elements of his personality, and his concern for his family is genuine. He’s wrong about quite a few things. But I don’t reject him. I would insist on the word ‘understandable’, rather than ‘sympathetic’. Because you don’t set out to make a character sympathetic, you go about your business to render him understandable.”
Driven by his holier-than-thou outlook on life, Fox uproots his family and flees the rampant consumerism and capitalism of America. Setting up shop in the jungle, he seeks to build a perfect society of his own, and when things don’t go to plan, he improvises. Which, in this case, means telling everyone the United States has been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, and generally causing more harm than good.
As much as he tries to present himself as an idealistic family man, he’s anything but. Ford didn’t want to get viewers on the character’s side, which was more difficult for him to achieve than other actors, since they’d become so accustomed to seeing him save the day playing guys who don’t have a bad bone in their body.
It might even be a stretch to call Fox a monster, although he’s undoubtedly a self-absorbed prick. It was the darkness that drew him to the part, and even though he wasn’t a red hulk or a quiet killer, he wanted to embrace his monstrous side nonetheless.
