In his inestimably honest way, Harrison Ford answered the most common question fans of Indiana Jones and Star Wars fans alike in his famous roles in both blockbuster franchises.
Ford, 80, was interviewed by Esquire reporter Ryan D’Agostino, who asked him what kinds of questions Star Wars superfans asked him.
“Well, they usually ask me, ‘If there was a fight between Han Solo and Indiana Jones, who would f***in’ win?’ And I say, ‘Me, a**hole! I don’t want to f***ing make s*** up like that. I mean, what are you asking me that crap for?’”
Ford played Han Solo for the first time in the original Star Wars in 1977; he later played Indiana Jones for the first time in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in 1981.
“We look for ourselves, and we look for useful information to help us navigate our f***ing lives and the world that we’re living in,” Ford said of people who love movies and books. “We don’t realize we’re looking for that. But we’re looking to pull out of a fantasy something that’s useful to us. And what’s useful to us is to emotionally participate in things outside of our own lives.”
Ford spoke of the new Indiana Jones movie, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” — which will be his last — and what it’s like to be 80. One scene had Ford riding a horse on a subway platform, and as he finished the scene, he felt hands on his legs.
He recalled, “I thought, what the f***? Like I was being attacked by gropers. I look down and there’s three stunt guys there making sure I didn’t fall off the stirrup. They said, ‘Oh, we were just afraid because we thought, you know, and bah bah bah bah’. And I said, Leave me the f*** alone, I’m an old man getting off a horse and I want it to look like that!”
Asked why he hasn’t written his autobiography, Ford explained that he had encountered Elton John at Stella McCartney’s fiftieth-birthday party, and John asked him why he hadn’t done so. “I said, ‘I thought about it, but I decided I’m not going to do it, because I didn’t want to tell the truth,’” Ford remembered. “And I saw the disappointment on his face — Elton’s a pretty genuine guy, you know. I wanted to mollify him, so I said, ‘But I didn’t want to lie, either.’ So that’s the reason I’m not writing a book: because I don’t want to tell the truth, and I don’t want to lie.”