Does it get more legendary than Harrison Ford? Not really. The guy has been doing it longer than most of us have been alive, and now that we’re all adults, he’s still doing it! Ford has a single Oscar nomination to his name, but that does little to denote how much he’s meant to pop culture over the last five decades.
He’s Han Solo, Jack Ryan, Rick Deckard, and Jacob Dutton — he’s Indiana Jones, both in the historical sense and the current sense, and he’s reprising Indy in the upcoming film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. It’s impressive that he can still get the job done, but even more impressive when you consider how old the actor is.
How many candles did Ford blow out last year?
Ford is 80 years old and made his screen debut in 1966. Well, unofficially. He played a bellhop in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round but went uncredited. He was credited as Harrison J. Ford in A Time for Killing, which was released the following year, but the film didn’t do much to boost his career. Nothing did, actually. The actor became so fed up with the lack of good parts he was getting that he decided to become a carpenter by the end of the decade.
It proved a wise decision, at least in the short term. Ford had a wife and two kids at the time and built decks for the likes of Joan Didion, Sergio Mendes, and Mamas, and the Papas singer Michelle Phillips paid the rent a hell of a lot better than bit parts in forgettable genre films. It wasn’t until producer Fred Roos championed the actor that he got a piece worthy of his talents. The part in question? The central villain in George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973). The film would gross over $100 million at the box office and establish Ford’s relationship with Lucas, which would serve him incredibly well throughout his career.
What was Harrison Ford’s first movie?
Ford’s profile got increasingly better throughout the decade, as he landed bit parts in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now, which was released in 1979 but filmed before the release of Ford’s breakout role, Star Wars (1977). It would be redundant to state the impact that the original Star Wars had on the world, so I’ll just note that Ford became a superstar at the age of 35 years old. Not bad for a guy who was building decks a decade earlier.
The next decade of Ford’s career is among the most significant acting stretches ever. He released The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Blade Runner (1982), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Witness (1985), and The Mosquito Coast (1986) before he turned 45. Four of these are generational classics, one of these earned him an Oscar nomination, and the other is supremely underrated (The Mosquito Coast might be his best performance).
We don’t have enough space to recap Ford’s entire career. Still, I highlight this specific period because it’s the period that gets replicated during Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The film used de-aging technology to make Ford look like he did in the 1980s, and the actor could not be more pleased with the end result.
“It was fun for me to see how well it worked because I feel very strongly that it’s the best example of de-aging, if you will, that we’ve seen yet,” Ford told SiriusXM. “It’s not a photoshopping kind of thing, it really is my face from 40 years ago… I thought it was a great way to start.”
Who are we to argue with one of the greatest stars of all time?