The roles Harrison Ford never wanted to play: “I was stuffed into them by the studios”
He’s been a movie star for so long that it’s difficult to imagine him scrapping with dozens of actors for the most inconspicuous of parts, but Harrison Ford was once a jobbing thespian desperately on the hunt for work, just like so many others who enter the industry with nothing but big dreams and no money.
Even though he’d starred in two consecutive ‘Best Picture’ nominees in George Lucas’ American Graffiti and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Ford would be absent from the big screen for the next three years until he reappeared as Han Solo in Lucas’ Star Wars, and it would be an understatement to say he hasn’t looked back since.
Lucas famously had no intention of casting him as the roguish space smuggler after vowing that he wouldn’t hire any of his American Graffiti cast members for the space opera, and he made an almost identical vow when he once again refused to employ Ford as Indiana Jones when he was developing Raiders of the Lost Ark until Tom Selleck dropped out and opened the door.
Since then, Ford has rarely – if ever – had to audition for a part, a far cry from his early days when he’d play whatever character his paymasters told him to. He wasn’t necessarily a big fan of the material or even the genre, but when the bills needed to be paid and he couldn’t find anything else, he didn’t really have a choice.
Ford enjoyed the rare distinction of replacing John Wayne in a role when he was cast in The Frisco Kid after ‘The Duke’ backed out, but he was more than familiar with the western by then. He’d appeared in episodes of The Virginian and Gunsmoke, the TV movie The Intruders, and theatrical releases A Time for Killing and Journey to Shiloh long before Star Wars, not that he’d have chosen them himself.
“Westerns were being done quite a bit on television when I was first in Hollywood,” he recalled to Time Out. “So I was stuffed into them by the studios I was under contract to. But I didn’t go looking for them. I wanted to be useful in all kinds of parts and genres. I never anticipated being a leading man. I thought I’d be playing character roles, and that means you don’t think so much about the genre and more about the part.”
With that in mind, it may not be a coincidence that after starring in half a dozen western projects across film and television within the space of a decade and before the end of the 1970s, Ford wouldn’t return to the dusty plains until 2011’s Cowboy’s & Aliens, which led to another decade-long sabbatical before he starred opposite Helen Mirren in the Yellowstone prequel series, 1923.
