THE LAST TIME I SPOKE WITH HIM WAS ON THE PHONE, THREE WEEKS AFTER WE DRANK BOURBON AT HIS house. We sat at the bar in what I’ll call the family room, a gleaming wooden bar with the bottles lined up behind, organized in neat rows by type of liquor. We ate Emmentaler cheese that Harrison Ford had sliced in the kitchen with a silver cheese knife and arranged on a plate with a handful of wheat crackers. That was in Los Angeles, where he lives when he’s not at his most-of-the-time home, the ranch in Wyoming that he bought in the eighties.
He was now in Atlanta. His voice, the unmistakable rich, low grumble, came through the phone obscured by some shuffing in the background.
“How you doing?” he asked.
In movies, Ford’s voice can tremble and quiver at low volume, just enough to communicate a terrifying degree of urgency, like if you don’t do what he says right now, people could die. It can jump to a sharp holler when things get even worse. His voice can be tender. It can be funny and biting.
On the phone, he just sounded like a guy on a Sunday afternoon. The background shuffing quieted.
“I’m learning a bunch of lines for tomorrow,” he said, exhaling.
He was in Atlanta filming Captain America: New World Order, the fourth film in that franchise, in which he will play the president of the United States for the second time in his career.
I apologized for needing this additional time on the phone after he had been so generous in Los Angeles—breakfast, airplane hangar, driving around in his Tesla, the drinks at his home—but he said, “Don’t be silly.”
This would be our final interaction before I had to write this story. So, under pressure, I had to ask all lingering questions while approximating the kind of breezy conversation that tends to yield good article fodder. (He knew all of this, because we had talked about what exactly I was trying to accomplish, and what exactly he was trying to accomplish, with this article.)
“Is it fun, making a Marvel movie?” I asked, this being his first.
“Uh,” he said. “Yeah. I mean, there are tough days and easy days and fun days and all kinds of days. It’s a tough schedule and, yeah, it’s fun. But it’s not a walk in the park. It’s not fun fun. It’s work.”
This was work, too—taking my call on a Sunday afternoon—which I knew because we had also talked about that. Almost every profile I had read of Harrison Ford had been pretty much a story about what it’s like to write a profile of Harrison Ford, and how he’s grouchy, diffcult, impatient, or unwilling to talk about himself, and whether the writer can get him to talk about himself—can get him to finally, in this story, reveal the real Harrison Ford. He let me know early on that he doesn’t think that’s the point of these stories at all—the interviewer asking cleverly worded questions designed to lull the actor into revealing his demons and secrets and things he’s never told anyone, and the actor just trying to promote a movie.
As we talk on the phone on a Sunday afternoon, I think about the first morning we met, for breakfast. I told him that, with every assignment, I always try to write the greatest magazine profile ever written. (Silly, and true.)
And he said, “Well, that’s fine, but you’ve got to have material to work with.” He stopped cutting his chicken sausage for a second and pointed
