Lifestyle
Harrison Ford isn’t retiring: ‘I really wouldn’t know what to do with myself’
“I’m happy to be the age I am, and have no impulse to hide it,” says Harrison Ford. He’s shown above accepting the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in Los Angeles on March 1.
Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images
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Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images
After playing some of the most recognizable and beloved characters in cinematic history, Harrison Ford is not interested in retiring. “Without my work, I really wouldn’t know what to do with myself,” the 83-year-old actor says. “I really do love the work. … It constantly changes, and the people change, and the mission and the opportunity change, and it just makes for an interesting way to live your life.”
Ford initially struggled to find his footing in Hollywood. He worked on-and-off as a carpenter for years before landing the breakthrough role of Han Solo in the original Star Wars film. He went on to star in the Star Wars sequels, as well as the Indiana Jones movies and Blade Runner — all the while frequently performing his own action scenes.
“I don’t want to have to hide the face of the character because it’s a stunt guy,” he says. “I want [the audience] to feel the blow. I want them to see the anxiety. I want them to be there when the decision is made or when the decision is missed. I just want them to be there.”
In the current Apple TV series, Shrinking, Ford plays a therapist named Paul who’s been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Thus far, he says, the show’s writers haven’t shared with him the progression of Paul’s disease. Instead, he says, “Like a true Parkinson’s patient, I don’t really know what’s coming. … I’m sort of living with the symptoms I have been last described as having.”
Recently, Ford teared up while accepting a recognition for lifetime achievement at the Actor Awards. “That speech that I wrote was not crafted to be emotional; it just happened to me,” he says. “I feel slightly embarrassed by it, because I have enough experience with these things to want to be able to manage not to be overcome.”
Interview highlights
On being asked to help in Star Wars auditions while on a carpentry job at Francis Ford Coppola‘s office
I was there sweeping up. I was just finishing the job when George Lucas walked in [who Ford knew from appearing in Lucas’ last film, American Graffiti] … and I’m standing there in my carpenter’s work belt, sweeping up the floor. It turned out to be a fortuitous occasion, because weeks later I would end up being asked if I would do them a favor and read with the other actors who were being considered for the parts. … I never was told that I was ever to be considered, and then at the end of the process, I guess they ended up with two groups of three people that were in final consideration. I’ve always been amused that in the second group, the character of Han Solo would have been played by Chris Walken. I would have loved to see that.
On his most famous ad-lib in a film
[It’s] the line in Star Wars where Princess Leia tells me that she loves me and I say, “I know,” instead of saying “I love you too,” which is the scripted line. Simply the impulse was to be more in character. And George Lucas, who had written the line, was not so happy that I didn’t give him the original version. But I really felt strongly about it. So he made me sit next to him when he previewed the film in a public movie theater in San Francisco and it got … a good laugh. And so he accepted it and left it in.
On seeing Star Wars for the first time on screen
I was blown away. I mean, I was really shocked by the power of the film. We shot in England and our English crew were not used to something like Star Wars, and so they were pretty sure that it was going to be a disaster. And we weren’t far from that opinion, ourselves, the actors.
On performing an emergency landing while flying solo in a vintage World War II airplane
Let’s just start by saying that it was a mechanical failure. … It was a 74-year-old airplane, and I was 74 years old at the time. .. Four hundred feet in the air above the airport, the engine quit. And it’s my home airport, and I was familiar with the surrounding terrain, which is cluttered with houses, wires and cars, and people. So I turned to a golf course that was there. …
In my ear was the very clear voice of one of my aviation mentors who always, when talking about mechanical failures or other kinds of failures, the advice was to “fly the airplane as far into the crash as possible.” You think about this thing when you’re a pilot, you think about the potential, the possibility of it happening, and of course you train. So when it happened, it was not really a surprise, and I thought I knew what I had to do to handle it, so I just started doing the things that needed to be done. … I don’t remember actually being scared. [My injuries] were more than described in the newspaper, but I’m over them all, thank you. I got my license back and continue to fly. … I am not a thrill seeker. I am a very conservative pilot. It’s not that I do crazy stuff for the fun of it.
On objecting to the Vietnam War draft
I was facing being drafted and I hired a lawyer to represent me to the draft board. I had to explain why I might qualify as a conscientious objector. I explained that I did not have a history of religious affiliation. My mother was Jewish, my father Catholic. … I was raised Democrat. I’m quite happy to accept other people’s versions of God, but I found in a Protestant theologian named Paul Tillich, a sentence that said: If you have trouble with the word God, take whatever is central and most meaningful to your life and call that God.
And to me that was life itself, the complexity, the biodiversity, the incredible integration and complexity of nature, to me seemed to be the same thing as God. And so I prepared an explanation that was probably so unusual that it found the edge of a desk and had a lot of things piled on top of it because it didn’t fit a niche. They never got back to me, basically. The draft board never got back to me.
Lauren Krenzel and Nico Gonzalez Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Milly Alcock in Supergirl.
Warner Bros. Pictures
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Warner Bros. Pictures
Hollywood’s newest Supergirl is kind of a dirtbag — in the good way. Fearless and grumpy, Supergirl (Milly Alcock) sets out on a quest to support a new pal’s revenge journey and to make a point that should be clear by now: Never mess with a lady’s dog. Also featuring David Corenswet and Jason Momoa, is Supergirl a worthy follow up to Superman?
If you want more DC superhero action, check out these episodes:
‘Superman’ takes off and nails the landing
‘The Batman’ puts the emo in emote
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Lifestyle
L.A. Affairs: After decades of near-misses, I finally told him: ‘I’m not leaving here without you’
It didn’t take endless quarantining with my spouse during the COVID-19 pandemic to end my marriage of over two decades. By the summer of 2019, menopause — and the extra-added “bonus” of frontal fibrosing alopecia that it awakened — was pummeling me physically and mentally to the extent that I no longer had the capacity to function inside the dysfunction of my life.
The relief that came with the decision to finally let go was completely dwarfed by the immense pain of severing a family in two. I cried as I packed. I cried as I unpacked. I was rolling endlessly in a dark wave that would not stop; my feet could not tell sand from sky. Once I managed to break the surface, I reached out.
I called Tish, Diane and Michelle, three smart, strong, nurturing women who’d been through and survived divorce. I also called my brother, Dan, and my friends Doug and Steve, three kind, creative, funny men who always “got” me.
As for Steve, we met in the spring of 1984 when he auditioned to be the drummer for the Secrets, the band Dan, Doug and I had started the year before. In our small-town high school of fewer than 400 students, he had flown completely under my radar, as he was two years younger, and he joined marching band the year after I’d ditched my baritone horn for a microphone and Pat Benatar tights. Steve aced the audition, and the four of us clicked immediately over our shared love of the Pretenders and all things Monty Python. By mid-June, the Secrets were playing local bars and biker parties in the middle of nowhere, and I was head over heels in love with the drummer.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with a boy from my hometown.
I had spent my whole life dying to get out of Middlebourne, W.Va., and had been champing at the bit to leave for college, but by late August, that no longer meant freedom; it meant that I’d have to leave Steve behind. I told myself we’d defy the odds and make it work. He was my soul mate. But we were just kids, and there was no internet, no cellphones with unlimited text and calling. By February 1985, the divide was too great. In a moment of loneliness, I cheated on him. It was over, and I was firmly told to take my place in the friend zone.
I spent the following year flailing and failing in college before making the bold, half-baked decision to drop out of the West Virginia University theater program and move to Los Angeles, a place I’d never been, to pursue a singing career. When Steve found out that I was moving across the country, he softened his friend-zone stance and told me he loved me. On July 13, 1986, he went with my parents to Pittsburgh International Airport to see me off.
For the next 33 years, we would come together and drift apart — sometimes as lovers but mostly as friends. During a visit to my Hollywood apartment in 1988, when he was still in college and the timing was still wrong, I told him, “Who knows. Maybe in 30 years, I’ll come back and get you.”
In November 2019, Steve came to visit me for a long weekend.
I picked him up at Los Angeles International Airport and took him straight to Zuma Beach for a picnic, where we watched dolphins jumping in the waves while the seagulls stole our potato chips. The following day, we cozied up for an afternoon of wine and cheese at Cornell Wine Co. in Old Agoura, then made our way over Topanga Canyon for dinner at Canyon Bistro & Wine Bar.
The night before he flew home, we watched the sun set from our table by the lake at Zin Bistro Americana in Westlake Village. I felt giddy, excited, seen, understood and appreciated in a way I hadn’t felt in a very long time. While it was tempting to jump right in with both feet, we decided to date long distance and take things slowly.
On March 26, 2020, while Steve was still recovering from being profoundly ill with COVID, I arrived at his doorstep at 6 a.m. and proclaimed, “I’m not leaving here without you.”
Two weeks later, after packing most of his belongings into U-Haul shipping crates, we left Parkersburg, W.Va., in Steve’s red Volkswagen Golf with two suitcases, one Treeing Walker Coonhound and one Aussie/Chow mix. I-40 West was practically empty; just us and the occasional car or Amazon truck.
We arrived in California on Easter Sunday and joined the rest of the world in quarantine, not knowing how it would affect our work and financial future. We took a lot of long walks to help deal with the stress of the not knowing, but the magic panacea for me came the day Steve’s Harley-Davidson arrived in one of the crates.
We cruised up and down PCH, and roared our way up and over Mulholland Highway, Stunt Road, Malibu Canyon and Decker Canyon, stopping along the way to stretch our legs, feel the sea spray on our faces and take in views from the valleys to the coastline. We were surrounded by so much beauty; it was almost impossible to let trepidation win.
On one particularly memorable ride on Mulholland Highway between Kanan Road and SR 23 near Saddle Rock, we came around a bend and — bam! — right in front of me was the greenest mountain range I’d ever seen in California, gleaming spectacularly in the sunlight. As I inhaled its gorgeousness and exhaled my stress, I thought, “I can’t believe I get to see this. I can’t believe I get to do this. I can’t believe I get to be with Steve.”
In September 2024, I got to marry Steve.
As my brother, Dan, said at the reception, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”
The author lives in the suburbs of Los Angeles with her husband, Steve, and their dogs, Coco Puff and Kira.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
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