The role Harrison Ford didn’t think would be difficult to play: “Just another day at the office”
What do you think is the best Harrison Ford movie? The Fugitive? Witness? The first Indiana Jones film, maybe? Or is it Ridley Scott’s neon dystopian Blade Runner?
Well, the answer is none of those, because it’s Francis Ford Copolla’s 1974 The Conversation, despite starring listening-in expert Gene Hackman. But that’s by the by, because the point is Harrison Ford has been in a lot of good films and put in a lot of great performances.
It’s just as well, given he’s been at it since the late 1960s, when he genuinely considered packing up and becoming a carpenter because he didn’t like the kind of roles he was landing as an actor. As chance would have it, he did bits and pieces for a casting director who secured him an audition with George Lucas, and history’s jigsaw pieces began to slot together.
He landed a part in Lucas’ huge low-budget surprise hit American Graffiti in 1975, which led directly to his becoming Han Solo, and thereby a global superstar. Although he did get other parts in the following five years or so, like in Gene Wilder’s The Frisco Kid, he was now, for all intents and purposes, Han Solo, that was until 1981 and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The Steven Spielberg-directed adventure made Ford somehow even more famous and meant he was concurrently starring in essentially the two biggest movie franchises of all time at the same time, both series going on to have another two instalments in the 1980s.
The actor went through the late 1980s and ‘90s with a string of commercial successes, especially as CIA agent Jack Ryan in the Tom Clancy adaptations, Air Force One and Clear and Present Danger, and as Dr Richard Kimble in the brilliant The Fugitive opposite Tommy Lee Jones in 1993, another Academy Award nomination winning movie.
This century he’s slowed down a little bit and there has been the odd mis-step, 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull representing a fairly sizeable one, and Ford has taken on more supporting roles in the last ten years or so, including strapping on his light sabre once more for JJ Abrams and another go around future Los Angeles in Blade Runner 2049 with Ryan Gosling.
As of 2025, he’s appeared as the latest incarnation of the Hulk in Marvel’s Captain America: Brave New World. Taking up his place as US President Thaddeus ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross in the movie, which saw Anthony Mackie take over from Chris Evans in the title role, Ford didn’t see the transformational role as the big red guy as too much of an issue, describing it as “just another day at the office”.
While talking to Entertainment Weekly, he concluded: “I tried to understand the ambition of the filmmakers, and to be useful to them. I just didn’t sit home at night and say, ‘Oh, what do I want to do when I turn into the Hulk?’ It didn’t seem to me to be a terribly difficult acting proposition.”
