How a carpenter got the part of Han Solo
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Harrison Ford was sweeping a floor in Francis Ford Coppola’s office when George Lucas walked in. He was standing there in his carpenter’s work belt. Weeks later, someone asked him to read lines opposite the actors being considered for Star Wars. Nobody told Ford he was in the running.
The story has more than one version. The Hollywood Reporter says Ford had built an elaborate entrance for Coppola’s office at Goldwyn Studios, and that Lucas arrived with Richard Dreyfuss, who was up for a part. Ford read with the candidates for two weeks, then received the offer to play Han Solo. Empire magazine says legend places the meeting on a repair job, with Lucas scouting cheap talent for a film that 20th Century Fox approved through gritted teeth.
Ford had acted before he picked up the hammer, with six small film roles behind him. Empire says his attitude made him some high-level enemies, so he stepped out of the business and built things for showbusiness stars. One job was a home studio for the Latin musician Sergio Mendes. NPR says he worked on and off as a carpenter for years before Han Solo.
What Lucas had already seen
Lucas knew him from American Graffiti, the 1973 film that gave Ford his first major role. Ford played Bob Falfa, a cocky drag racer in a Stetson who cruises Modesto in a 1955 Chevrolet. He appears only intermittently, and Gold Derby says that was still enough to make him unforgettable. The Guardian says the hat was Ford’s idea, because he did not want to cut his long hair.
Ford has told Empire the same story from his side. Lucas wanted a crew cut. Ford had worn his hair long since college, so he proposed a cowboy hat. Lucas remembered some Modesto boys who cruised in cowboy hats, and the hat stayed. Ford calls it the first time a director let him have any input.
AARP goes further and says the film rescued him, at 30, from a career as a carpenter.
Those early years held an odd problem. Ford told Empire that audiences struggled to place him from one part to the next. He played a character in The Conversation whom nobody linked with American Graffiti. In Apocalypse Now he played an intelligence officer, and Lucas, who had seen the footage, did not recognise him until halfway through the scene.
That officer is Colonel G. Lucas, and he appears in a single scene as the man who sends Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard after Colonel Kurtz. The Guardian says the name was apparently Ford’s idea, a tribute to the director who launched his career.
The money, and the age
Ford was paid $2,000 a week in wages and expenses on Star Wars, and nothing more. He says he did not feel taken advantage of, because the film was a risk for Lucas on a tight budget.
He was also 35. Ford says he had some maturity and some experience, yet still looked young. Looking young had held him back earlier in his career, and then it turned into an advantage.
The casting list had other names on it. Ford told NPR he has always been amused that the second group of finalists had Chris Walken as Han Solo. He says he would have loved to see it.
Two films that made him a star
Ford said “I know” on set, and the line stayed in the film. That reply to Princess Leia, spoken just before Han Solo is frozen in carbonite, became the most-loved line in The Empire Strikes Back. The script gave Han a different answer, “I love you, too”, and the Guardian credits Ford with the improvement.
Ford told NPR that Lucas wrote the original line and was not happy to be denied it. Ford felt strongly that the reply was more in character. Lucas made him sit beside him at a public preview in San Francisco, and the audience gave “I know” a good laugh. Lucas accepted it and left it in.
What Ford saw in Star Wars
Ford says he was one of the few people who thought Star Wars would work, and he had not yet seen a single special effect. He told Empire that Lucas had tapped into something primordial, with a wise old warrior, a callow prince and a princess. Ford knew where he fitted. He was the rapscallion of the universe.
He gave the Hollywood Reporter a plainer reason. Ford says he knows little about science fiction but a lot about fairy tales, because he has children, and he could smell one. Han Solo, he says, was the smartass the story needed, the pepper in the dish.
The cast and crew did not all share his confidence. Ford told NPR that the English crew, who were not used to anything like Star Wars, were sure the film would be a disaster. The actors, he says, were not far from that opinion. Then he saw the finished picture and was blown away by its power.
Ford also thought the film was funny. He told Empire that he always saw Star Wars and Indiana Jones as comedies, with the humour coming out of the relationships. The Guardian adds a story about the script. Ford, it says, told Lucas the dialogue could be typed but not spoken, and after seeing the finished film he admitted he had been wrong.
He did not sign the sequel clause in his first Star Wars contract. He told the Hollywood Reporter it was his only objection. He still came back for The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. The original trilogy ran from 1977 to 1983.
How Raiders found its hero
It would be easy to call Star Wars the start of Ford’s reign as America’s box office king. Empire says that cannot be right, because Mark Hamill would then be up there with him, and Ford’s star did not rise until the first Indiana Jones film in 1981. Gold Derby agrees that the public only knew him as Han Solo when Raiders of the Lost Ark opened. The film took audiences completely by surprise, and Ford played Indiana Jones as an everyman who faces dire consequences at every turn and somehow finds a way out.
He was not the first choice. Tom Selleck was unable to get out of his Magnum PI television contract, so the part went to Ford. Ford says Lucas rang him without a script and floated the idea of playing the part in Steven Spielberg’s film. Ford puts it plainly. He got the part by default.
The film was a deliberate throwback. The Guardian’s feelgood series says Lucas, his co-writer Philip Kaufman and Spielberg grew up on the serials of the 1930s and 1940s, including Buck Rogers and Zorro’s Fighting Legion. Those serials ran in roughly 15-minute chunks before the main feature, and Raiders is packed with the same kind of action and intrigue.
Empire sees Jones as a new sort of hero. He fought hard, joked drily and charmed viewers of every age and sex. Ford put his own method as a joke about sport: he is a coward at it, but he can act fearless. The Guardian says his sweaty, slightly shambolic presence stops the set pieces from feeling mechanical.
The part he turned down at first
Ford refused Blade Runner the first time Ridley Scott offered it. He had spent much of the 1970s in London, for Star Wars, Force 10 From Navarone and The Empire Strikes Back, and the plan for the shoot would have taken him there again. He was homesick. He took the part in the end, and Rick Deckard became one of his best-known roles.
The films that defined him
Critics rank Ford’s films in very different orders. The Guardian puts What Lies Beneath first, and AARP puts The Fugitive first. Neither is an Indiana Jones film.
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What Lies Beneath is Robert Zemeckis’s ghost story, with Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer as a couple facing an empty nest and then a haunting. The Guardian calls it the deepest, darkest work of his career. It also points to an earlier clue. A decade before, Martin Scorsese invited Ford to play the harassed lawyer in Cape Fear, and Ford declined unless he could have Robert De Niro’s role as the tattooed psychopath.
The adventure films
The Indiana Jones sequels divide critics. Temple of Doom opens with a sequence of almost exactly 20 minutes, which starts with a Shanghai nightclub number in 1935 and ends in whitewater rapids at the foot of the Himalayas. The Guardian calls it among the best sequences of Spielberg’s career, then says the film lands hard in a mix of leaden romance, gross-out comedy and cultural insensitivity. Its violence led to the PG-13 rating. AV Club calls the film dark and disappointing.
Last Crusade repaired the mood. Sean Connery joined as Indy’s estranged father Henry, and AV Club says the two men bicker and crack wise to far better effect than Ford does with his female lead. The Guardian calls it Ford’s sweetest performance as the hero, with notes of vulnerability and childlike glee. The series came back in 2008 with Crystal Skull and again in 2023 with Dial of Destiny.
AARP sums up the argument over which is best. Some say Last Crusade, others say Dial of Destiny, but most agree that nothing beats the first adventure.
The science fiction that grew
Blade Runner was not an immediate success at the box office. Collider says it has since become an influential icon of science fiction, thanks to its neon-lit visuals, Vangelis’s score and Ridley Scott’s direction. Ford gave Rick Deckard a restrained performance that grounded the futuristic setting, and he returned 35 years later for Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. The Guardian enjoys that sequel for a scene in which Ford cuts short a fight with Ryan Gosling by suggesting a drink.
The man on the run
The Fugitive adapts a 1960s television series about a surgeon on the run after he is falsely accused of his wife’s murder. Ford plays Dr Richard Kimble, and Tommy Lee Jones won the best supporting actor Oscar as the marshal chasing him. The film earned seven Oscar nominations, including best picture.
AARP ranks it first of its ten and points to the stunt that sells it. A real train hits a real bus full of convicts, with no CGI. The Guardian calls Ford superb as the grounded, hounded hero.
The quieter roles
Ford took on quieter roles in the late 1980s. In 1988 he made Frantic for Roman Polanski and Working Girl for Mike Nichols, and the Guardian says he was soon being talked up as the next Cary Grant. It calls that over-optimistic. Collider says his Jack Trainer in Working Girl showed a more comic and romantic side, and notes the film earned six Oscar nominations.
AARP says Ford shows a quiet kind of power in a supporting role there, and that his stillness gives Melanie Griffith room to shine. The same site likes his underacting in Presumed Innocent, where he plays a prosecutor accused of murder. Director Alan J. Pakula, AARP says, demanded a cooler and more cerebral take than the first script, and Ford’s reserve makes it hard to tell whether his character is guilty.
The Mosquito Coast divides opinion more. Ford plays Allie Fox, who takes his family to the jungles of Central America, in Peter Weir’s film of Paul Theroux’s novel, from a script by Paul Schrader. AV Club says some critics think he nailed the descent into madness and others think the role slightly exceeded his reach. The Guardian finds his mania unconvincing but his sincerity beyond doubt, and Gold Derby notes the role earned his second Golden Globe nomination.
The president and the analyst
Ford played Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan twice, in Patriot Games in 1992 and Clear and Present Danger in 1994. AV Club says he played Ryan as a slow burn, in contrast with Alec Baldwin’s more passionate version. AARP calls Clear and Present Danger the superior thriller of the two.
Air Force One put him in the White House. Wolfgang Petersen directed Ford as a president who fights hijackers led by Gary Oldman. Collider remembers the line “Get off my plane” and calls the film an essential entry in his career. AV Club says Ford made too many duds between 1995 and the early 2010s, which makes this hit the exception.
A late role showed another side of him. In 42, Ford plays Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers executive who signed Jackie Robinson. AARP calls it utterly distinctive in his career, a role he disappears into, and quotes Rickey’s colleague Art Stewart saying Ford nailed even the way Rickey chewed his cigar.
The directors and co-stars behind the roles
George Lucas comes first. He directed Ford in American Graffiti and then cast him in Star Wars and brought him the idea for Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Steven Spielberg directed the first four Indiana Jones films. James Mangold, who directed the fifth, says Spielberg shot four of them with Ford. Dial of Destiny is the first film in the series that Spielberg did not direct, though he remains an executive producer.
Partners on screen
Carrie Fisher played Princess Leia opposite him, and AV Club says the chemistry between the two is off the charts. The same piece says Ford wielded the star power in Star Wars, while Alec Guinness, Mark Hamill and Fisher each brought something of their own. Fisher and Ford reunited in The Force Awakens, 32 years after his last Star Wars film.
Raiders gave him a different foil in Karen Allen. The Guardian calls her Marion a hard-drinking, two-fisted heroine, and AARP calls her a brilliant feminist one. AARP also credits Lawrence Kasdan, whose scripts include The Empire Strikes Back, The Big Chill, Body Heat and Silverado, as an immortal screenwriter. The Temple of Doom paired Ford with Kate Capshaw, who later married Spielberg, and with the young Ke Huy Quan as Short Round.
Sean Connery played Indy’s father in Last Crusade, and AV Club says he and Ford brought out the best in each other. River Phoenix played the young Indy in the same film, according to AARP.
Directors who drew out something new
Peter Weir directed Ford twice, in Witness and The Mosquito Coast. River Phoenix played his son in the second, and Helen Mirren played his wife. Ford and Mirren reunited decades later for the western 1923.
Mike Nichols gave him comedy. AARP calls Working Girl a big career comeback for the director. AV Club notes that Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver and Joan Cusack took the praise and the Oscar nominations while Ford stayed amiable and out of the way.
Alan J. Pakula, AARP says, held Presumed Innocent to a cooler register than its first script. Brian Helgeland cast Ford as Branch Rickey, opposite Chadwick Boseman’s Jackie Robinson, and AV Club says the director thought outside the box when he did.
The new generation
The Hollywood Reporter notes that Ford has said he enjoys working with younger talents such as Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Dial of Destiny and Jason Segel in Shrinking. Mads Mikkelsen, who played the Nazi villain in Dial of Destiny, says he first watched Indiana Jones at 15 and found it a huge inspiration.
The Guardian says Blade Runner 2049 later made possible Ford’s most uproarious screen appearance, a joyous, prolonged fit of giggles with Ryan Gosling and This Morning’s Alison Hammond.
A friend outside the cinema
One of Ford’s friends was a biologist. The late EO Wilson, who coined the term biodiversity, became friends with Ford after the two worked on conservation campaigns together. Wilson named a species of ant after the actor.
Why he is still working
Ford was 80 when Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny came out, and the film made a virtue of his age. Its hero is a professor of archaeology who complains while he performs his stunts. A digital prologue sets him in 1944, with a de-aged Ford punching Nazis. Ford calls Indiana Jones a closed chapter and says he feels a sense of completion.
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The reviews split. The film premiered at Cannes to lukewarm notices, and the BBC’s own review called it a depressing reminder of how much livelier his past adventures were. The Guardian was warmer, and found more zip, fun and narrative ingenuity than in Crystal Skull.
Ford collected an honorary Palme d’Or at the festival. Asked who should succeed him as Indiana Jones, he joked that Jennifer Lopez would be fantastic.
What the old films became
Collider says Indiana Jones lives on in video games and theme park attractions, and that Spielberg and Lucas redefined the adventure genre in a way that influenced many films trying to recapture the magic. A writer in the Guardian’s feelgood series recalls Raiders and its sequels turning up on one network or another every weekend. Gold Derby says Han Solo’s return in The Force Awakens was the film equivalent of comfort food, and that his scenes with the new characters gave them gravitas.
The slump, and the late run
Ford’s later career was not always a victory lap. The Guardian says that for a while he had the reputation of a grumpy recluse, and that films such as Firewall and Paranoia drifted close to straight-to-DVD fare. In interviews he was guarded and brittle, it says, and perhaps a little lost.
Then came a run of work on television. Ford plays a cranky therapist in Shrinking on Apple TV, and he has filmed two seasons of the western 1923. AARP says that at 80 he had rarely had a better year. The Guardian says that on Shrinking Ford has never seemed so relaxed, and that he was always respected but is now beloved. He also appears as the president in the new Captain America film, and Collider says audiences do not find that odd, because he played a president so well in Air Force One.
Why keep going? Ford gave Vanity Fair a plain answer. He gets essential human contact out of acting. He told NPR at 83 that without his work he would not know what to do with himself. He told the Hollywood Reporter that his motto is “Keep moving”.
What he does with the rest of his time
The Guardian calls Ford a longtime environmental advocate. In a Guardian interview at 83, he said he has been preaching about climate change for 30 years. The Guardian reports that Ford had to be evacuated from the Los Angeles wildfires earlier that year, although his Brentwood home was spared.
He received a conservation leadership award at the Field Museum in Chicago from the foundation of the late biologist EO Wilson. Ford told the Guardian he was hopeful, and that he was confident the world can mitigate climate change if people develop the political will. He added that human beings are incredibly adaptive and inventive, so they can usually fix a problem they concentrate on.
The Screen Actors Guild gave him its Life Achievement Award in Los Angeles on March 1. In the NPR interview he said he is happy to be the age he is, and has no impulse to hide it.
Starter guide
Each film below sits on at least two trusted critics’ lists of the best. Watch them in this order.
- American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973). The Guardian counts his Bob Falfa among Ford’s 20 best performances, and Empire lists the film among his 10 best.
- The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974). The Guardian counts his small role among his 20 best performances, and BBC Culture names the film among the 100 greatest American films.
- Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977). Empire lists it among his 10 best films, and BBC Culture names it among the 100 greatest American films. The Guardian credits Ford with understanding its tone.
- The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980). Empire lists it among his 10 best films, and BBC Culture names it among the 100 greatest American films.
- Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981). Empire puts it first among his 10 best films, and BBC Culture names it among the 100 greatest American films.
- Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). The Guardian counts Deckard among his 20 best performances, and Empire lists the film among his 10 best.
- Witness (Peter Weir, 1985). The Guardian counts his Oscar-nominated detective among his 20 best performances, and Empire lists Peter Weir’s film among his 10 best.
- Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988). The Guardian counts his supporting turn among his 20 best performances, and Empire lists the film among his 10 best.
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Steven Spielberg, 1989). The Guardian calls it his sweetest Indy turn and counts it among his 20 best, and Empire lists the film among his 10 best.
- The Fugitive (Andrew Davis, 1993). The Guardian calls him superb as the grounded, hounded hero, and Empire lists the film among his 10 best.
