Harrison Ford thinks you have taken him way too seriously over the years. Somehow he developed this reputation for earnest intensity, but he’s not sure how or why that happened. “As far as I’m concerned, everything I’ve ever done is comedy,” he tells Vanity Fair.
Maybe he adamantly pointed his finger one too many times, or maybe his ultra-deadpan delivery was just too persuasive over the years. Consider the inherent absurdity in his most memorable roles: an archaeologist who conducts most of his scholarly research with a bullwhip? A boastful starship captain whose copilot is a giant space ape? A cop who goes undercover to protect an Amish woman and her young son after the son sees a murder? All right, maybe that last one is the exception that proves the rule.
But Ford maintains that even Witness has a sense of humor. “In a way, yes, because the jokes really are the surprise in everything, in a serious movie or in a streaming comedy,” he says. “Finding the humor in the moment is what makes it survivable for us most of the time. I do like to invest characters that I play with their own personal sense of humor. I think everybody has one, even if they’re not funny.”
It took the Apple TV+ comedy series Shrinking, in which Ford plays a gruff senior therapist at a clinic opposite Jason Segel and Jessica Williams, to highlight that the actor everyone considered the thinking man’s action hero was really a comedian at heart. “I’m a silly person,” Ford says—as seriously as possible. (Maybe he was pointing his finger too. We were on the phone.)
Shrinking returns for season two on October 16, so Ford fans will soon see him jabbing even more holes in his staid exterior with that pointing finger of his. “It’s always so interesting how the narrative gets formed, right? Because it’s out of your control. And the narrative on this show has been, ‘Who knew that Harrison Ford could do a comedy?’” says Shrinking cocreator Bill Lawrence, whose other credits include Ted Lasso and Scrubs. “It is crazy. He’s a comedic actor.”
Lawrence insists that of course he and fellow Shrinking creators Segel and Brett Goldstein knew the now 82-year-old actor had the requisite absurdity in him. “When we wrote the script, we wrote a ‘Harrison Ford’ type because I have been around long enough to have seen him in Working Girl. If Indiana Jones did not have a comedic self-awareness, the movie would not have worked. If Star Wars didn’t have an inherent comedic cockiness to that character in such an earnest movie, it wouldn’t have worked,” Lawrence says. “So I knew Harrison Ford was funny, man. I’d seen him be funny a bazillion times.”
What they didn’t realize was just how far Ford would go. Lawrence and his fellow creators assumed “what’ll be funny is having Harrison be gruff and cranky and that’ll be his comedic wheelhouse. But then when he got there, we’re like, Oh shit, he has a lot more tools than that.” Ford’s Dr. Paul Rhoades is not only a truth-telling fatherly figure to Segel’s widowed therapist, Jimmy Laird, but his toughness has been shown to mask a vulnerability within himself that is both comical and emotional. Ford has been willing to sing a pop song at the top of his lungs to silence a younger colleague, perform a one-man Cheech & Chong-esque routine after Dr. Paul consumes too many pot gummies, and shamelessly mock his own self-serious reputation in less-than-dignified situations.
The key to Ford’s style of comedy? Commitment. “I’ll give you an example,” Lawrence says. “The joke in the show is that Harrison’s character didn’t know what the word ‘raw-dogging’ meant. And Harrison was, justifiably, initially like, ‘Uh, is that going to be funny? Or is it just going to make me the picture of some old guy that’s out of touch?’ [He was] still cool enough to let us try it, and it got such a laugh with the crew that his character continually used it the wrong way.” The gag continued, Lawrence says, “until finally someone says, ‘Stop fucking saying ‘raw-dogging’ all the time.’ He’s like, ‘I’ll say whatever I want.’”
That’s when one of the characters breaks the news to Dr. Paul that the term he thinks means “ambush” or “confrontation” actually means having sex without a condom. “And then Harrison Ford’s character took a long moment and says, ‘Well, then…I’ll stop saying it,’” Lawrence says. At the risk of killing the joke by dissecting it, the laugh comes from Dr. Paul being stubborn, not just out of touch. He’s committed. He believes in what he’s doing. And when he’s wrong, well…it’s that abrupt self-awareness that makes it funny.
Ford walked Vanity Fair through some roles that have both subtle and not-so-subtle laughs:
Vanity Fair: You must still get a thrill out of doing this work or else you wouldn’t keep doing it. What do you get out of acting nowadays, and what made you want to devote your time to a show like Shrinking?
Harrison Ford: Oh man, I get out of it essential human contact. I get to imagine with people that have great skill and experience…. It’s fun to work with these people.
Is it true that you once said moviegoers pay to see actors like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger beat people up, but they buy their ticket to see you get beaten up?
I did always feel that it served the characters I played well to take a beating before they dispensed one.
That’s a kind of slapstick, right? Humor is a part of that.
I think it is. It’s a great cosmic joke, isn’t it?
Bill Lawrence said the thing that makes you funny is commitment. He says your Shrinking character is very devoted to an idea or to a belief system, is reluctant to change his mind, and so when he’s forced to, that’s funny. What’s your take on that assessment?
What Bill has said about commitment is true. You really believe that the character believes what he’s talking about. When they have such range and depth, you can get away with the kind of humor that we do and have it serve both the serious purposes and the entertainment that we hope to bring.
Bill’s example was Dr. Paul’s insistence on using a vulgar term like raw-dog right up to the moment he finds out what it actually means. Instead of being a joke about an old guy who is out of touch, it’s a laugh at the expense of a guy who is very smart but not as smart as he thinks he is.
Well, I think he actually is as smart as he thinks he is. And I am not going to give that up. I think we know these people. We know them deeply, more deeply than normally. We know the depth of their emotional situation. It allows the comedy to be more real. Or feel more real.
I was glad to hear you say that you feel like humor has been a big part of every role you’ve played. Even rewatching The Conversation from 1974, one of your earliest roles, you play an ominous, creepy office assistant. But you have this line like, “Hey, try these Christmas cookies. I baked them myself.” And then Gene Hackman’s character sniffs around them when you leave the room. It’s just a little weird moment of humor in an otherwise very heavy movie. Is that line something you added by chance?
It is. I had tested for the part that Freddie Forrest played. And Francis Ford Coppola told me that he was going to write something for me. When we got around to handing out the scripts for the cold reading of what he wrote for me, the name of my character was “Young Man.” So I did everything I could to distinguish him from that lack of definition.
The cookies line made him a little friendly before he turned scary.
It was really just an inspiration that this would be something that would make the character distinctive. Particular.
Was there a type of comedy that you watched when you were young, when you began working as an actor that made you think, I’d like to try that someday?
I didn’t think much about it as an actor, but I did think about it as a person. I always enjoyed humor. I loved jokes. I loved the construction of jokes. My father was a joke teller. The wordsmithing and the ideas that lay behind a joke have always interested me. When I was thinking about becoming an actor, I was ambitious for both kinds of work—serious drama and comedy. I found myself doing both and not really distinguishing much between them. I think I think with the same actor’s head about a joke as I do about a serious or emotional scene.
Another of your very early roles was Bob Falfa in American Graffiti. He’s got that great scene where he is driving down the main strip, trash-talking another driver, and it’s like a comedy roast battle on wheels.
I’ll tell you what made the scene work as much as anything else—it’s the white cowboy hat. That helps characterize the person I’m playing. It gives that character permission to be larger than life somehow. That’s what I wanted from that character. But I wouldn’t have known how to do it without the white cowboy hat.
It gives him a bit of a presence and stature.
A sense of self. Yeah.
That reminds me of the role the fedora plays in the comedy of Indiana Jones. When you’re playing a scene for laughs, the brim tends to be flipped up.
I like visual information. It’s normal to adjust the hat to match the condition of the head that’s under it. When he’s being lighthearted, then it can be pushed back a bit. When he’s being threatening, it should come down to nearly cover his eyes. But that’s just, I don’t know…hat acting, I guess.
What Bill said about commitment and your Paul character from Shrinking also applies to Star Wars, doesn’t it? Han Solo definitely had commitment. He charges down that hallway, very brave and courageous, and then immediately has to turn tail and head back. That seems like an example of playing commitment for laughs.
He was a character that was committed to his ignorance. Deeply committed to his ignorance. But if he had been lacking in a sense of humor, it would not have been fun for the audience. But I saw that as physical acting that got character information across. I always felt that he was barely containing his physical impulses.
Some of the filmmakers you’ve worked with over the years were fantastic comedy directors, like Mike Nichols on Working Girl and Regarding Henry.
Of course, yes.
Nichols was somebody who thought deeply about the mechanics of comedy.
The experience working with Mike was an extraordinary one. People that encourage collaboration are the ones that get the most out of me, and especially when it comes to humor. You’ve got to have that permission to get goofy. And when it comes from somebody that you have so much respect for and is obviously a master craftsman, it’s extraordinary to learn from those people.
How about your time with Ivan Reitman in Six Days, Seven Nights? He was another filmmaker who was a real student of comedy.
[Laughs] I love that movie. I think it is really funny, and Anne Heche was brilliant in it. And I really enjoyed working with Ivan and his bunch of merrymen.Did he intellectualize the humor of the scenes with you, or was it more of an instinctual thing?
I don’t think people intellectualize things with me. The path into that character in those circumstances is not an intellectual path, it’s a visceral path.
Again, your island charter pilot in that film was a very confident fellow, even if sometimes the confidence was misplaced.
I think I felt that confidence because I was pinning it on the pilot personality that I was beginning to know, as I was beginning my own flying career around that time.
Oh really? Was that when that interest started?
I didn’t start flying until I was about 50, and then I got my license when I was 52. It was a great character and the circumstances were fruitful for the kind of humor that was part of it.
In addition to filmmakers, you’ve shared the screen with some genuinely funny people—Gene Wilder in The Frisco Kid, Carrie Fisher in the Star Wars films, Will Ferrell in the Anchorman sequel. Does it make you up your game or sharpen your skills?
I think comedy is not competitive. I love collaboration. Some people are easy to work with; some people are not easy to work with. Some people torture themselves to get comedy to come out. And I kind of felt that Gene was one of those people.
How so?
He was always very serious about his jokes. And a very different personality to Carrie and a very different personality to Will. There are people that are funny that are very different from each other. And I guess there’s room for everybody.
I’ve seen you do late-night interviews in a hot dog costume, and you get to do some really off-the-wall things on Shrinking. Do you like when a writer pushes the boundaries and encourages you to be silly or do something unexpected?
Oh yeah, but I don’t need any encouragement. I’m really quite goofy all on my own. But when I’m in the company of other people that I know to be goofy, there’s a certain relaxation of the rules. I like to have fun. I like to be around people that are having fun. I don’t like to get too serious.
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