The movie Harrison Ford only made for the paycheque: “It wasn’t a big part, and I wasn’t paid big money”
It says something about the quality and success of Apple TV’s comedy drama Shrinking that this week, Harrison Ford said he feels it would be a “sufficient” way to end his career, because he has had a career that ranks up there with almost any actor in history who has made popular films.
Now 83 (when did that happen?) Ford has been at this acting lark longer than many people think, certainly most who believe that things really began for him with Star Wars in 1977. Go back further than Han Solo, and you’ll find some gems on Ford’s early CV, movies like the fantastic Francis Ford Coppola thriller The Conversation from 1974, and George Lucas’ pre-Star Wars comedy American Graffiti the previous year.
In fact, Ford had been a familiar face on TV screens for over a decade by the time he strapped on his blaster and made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs, thanks to western fare like Gunsmoke and the soap opera Dynasty. But it was, of course, as Solo that he became a global superstar; the film was way too successful and Ford was way too charismatic for it not to happen.
And so duly over the next five years or so, he became the handsome frontman that girls loved, and boys wanted to be like, not just Han Solo in two more movies but the whip-toting, boulder-dodging Indiana Jones too, on his way to becoming the highest-paid actor in the world.
But the same year that he first stepped onto the Millennium Falcon, he was still simply a jobbing actor, and so had to pay the bills just like the rest of us. That being the case, he signed on to a movie called Heroes starring Happy Days’ The Fonz himself, Henry Winkler, as a Vietnam War vet with PTSD, and if you’re thinking that sounds like a recipe for a terrible film, well, you’re right.
As Ford recalled: “I did Heroes for short money. It wasn’t a big part, and I wasn’t paid big money.” And it seems he was expected to be adaptable at short notice, resulting in a performance he felt was of no great consequence, especially compared to Winkler, who he thought was the star of the show.
He added: “Ten days before shooting Heroes, Jeremy (Paul Kagan, the director) changed my character from a mid-Western to a Missouri farm-boy. So off I went to Missouri with a tape recorder to learn the accent. I bummed around for about three days and went and met the actual type I was going to play – a guy interested in cars. I went into an auto-part store and told them I was a writer because if you tell them you’re an actor, you spend the rest of the time talking about movies.”
Heroes was surprisingly successful on release, making more than $30m on a budget of just over $3m, but it isn’t a film that Ford is remembered for and it didn’t fare well with critics. Despite that, Winkler won a Golden Globe nomination for his work in the lead role, as well as a Bafta nomination.
George Lucas, meanwhile, was preparing to make the phone call to Ford just a few months later that would change his life for good.
