I’m not going to brag. Well, no more than usual, but I’ve spent some time in the presence of Harrison Ford. It was towards the end of 2015, right before the rebooted Star Wars franchise took us all back to that galaxy far, far away, looking somewhat older and feeling slightly more sceptical about revisiting characters that hold such a beloved place in our Death Star-shaped hearts.
Thanks to director JJ Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy - president of Lucasfilm after The Walt Disney Company snapped up the company for an-actually-not-unreasonable $4 billion – all that fret and worry was unfounded, of course, with the current glut of Star Wars prequels, sequels and spin-offs pleasing both fans of the original and newcomers alike. Jar Jar who?
I met Ford at his house in Los Angeles. His house was neither overly opulent nor respectfully modest. It was a classic pad of The Older Hollywood Statesman: expensive little ornaments carved from mahogany dotted about on well-dusted white shelves; a pair of light-hued sofas whose cleanliness was willing me to spill my black coffee all over them. In fact, after we talked Ford took me for spin in his sports car, a Tesla if I remember correctly and we went for a bite to eat at a local brasserie, where he grunted and groaned about politics and the industry.
Throughout the interview he had the air of a man who was having to sit begrudgingly through semi-probing questions about his life. He wasn’t unpleasant, far from it, yet he’s also not a man who suffers fools. Ford likes the work of being an actor, the schedule and the grind of it. All the extra accoutrement that comes with fame and fortune? Well, he’d rather leave that frozen in carbonite.
I remember I came across a particular vintage image of Ford (not this one, but one similar) while researching cuts for the above cover interview; it was a photograph taken in Paris outside the Hotel Plaza Athénée. (Google it; we had trouble securing the rights to publish, but it’s online for all to see.) Said image was snapped either in the late Seventies or bang on 1980, a period when Ford’s leading man powers were just coming into their own.
Around this time the first Star Wars film had just dropped, and he was due to start shooting Raiders Of The Lost Ark with Steven Spielberg any moment. The world was his to plunder. The thing about Ford is he was a hippie at heart back then, an arty, thespy child of the counterculture movement and someone who used to make ends meet by selling posters for "happenings" and bands all along the West Coast. The whole carpentry thing was really just a ruse, an upstanding gig to get him by between auditions. In reality, Ford was your archetypal stoner type, if one with a megawatt smile and excellent hair.
That’s really why this smart outfit of Ford’s is so significant. The navy blazer, worn here with a daisy in the lapel is something of an emblem of his newly found top dog status, a man on the rise who suddenly knows what his swagger is worth. Such a conservative, traditional item – a blazer! – isn’t something that Ford would usually have been seen dead in around the bars and communes of SoCal; the smartest outfit he’d jump into would be a khaki linen shirt opened to reveal a tanned chest that in this day and age would get a restraining order issued against it.
Yet here he is with perfect facial hair, killer strides, giving the waiting world a look that seems to suggest “Who, me?” (Or per that classic image taken in Paris, “Who, moi?”) It’s a bona fide Fordism, an air of decadent nonchalance and one you can still see him pull at film premieres/aviation shows to this day. Schtick or otherwise, we swoon. We swoon hard. Right, kid?
