According to an interview with Variety, Academy and Emmy Award-nominated actor Harrison Ford distills his technique down to a single sentence:
“I say the words, do the work, rinse and repeat.”
Now, Ford may be being facetious, but he does provide a little more context later in the interview: “It’s what I love doing. I love telling stories. I love pretending to be somebody else.”
Though Ford is best known for his roles in franchise films — he has starred in multiple Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and Blade Runner films, to begin with — his Emmy Award-nominated role in the TV series Shrinking gave him an opportunity that he normally doesn’t get in film. “We get more time to develop a character over a season than one normally does in a film,” he points out.
On Shrinking, Ford plays Paul, a therapist who has Parkinson’s disease. On playing the character, Ford says, “It’s an additive process. One brick goes on another brick; pretty soon you have a house. But if you don’t have a firm foundation, then the whole thing is askew. You’re trying to find that place where you can use your honest experience to represent the ideas and the relationships and the elements of the personality of the character. That’s like being an item in a recipe. You’ve got to know what your job is here — am I the onion or am I the tomato?”
He also finds the arc of his character fascinating in his television roles. He continues, “Part of what I love about what I’m doing is that I don’t know what the writers are going to come up with. And normally it’s not something I would do, is take a shot like that. But I did it on 1923 and I did it on this. And it’s kind of fun to say, ‘Okay, I’ll figure out how to do it, even if I don’t know what it is.'”
Even in his dramatic roles, Ford notes that he can find a bit of humor. He explains, “I think there’s humor in everything. Sometimes it’s just God’s joke. A character that has a sense of humor is a lot more attractive than a character that doesn’t. If somebody doesn’t have a sense of humor, I don’t want to hang out with them. So I try and bring some form of a sense of humor to whatever character I play.
Harrison Ford’s Acting Advice on the “Delicate” Art of Comedy
And yet, even though he has has comedic roles in films like Anchorman 2, Ford realizes the importance of landing a joke. He says, “Comedy is delicate. You can fuck up a joke by using one word wrong in a 12-word sentence. I kind of like when it doesn’t fit my mouth and I have to make it work. It’s fun.”
Fans of Ford will be happy to learn that the actor has no plans to give up acting. When asked if he plans to retire, Ford responds, “No. That’s one of the things I thought was attractive about the job of an actor, was that they need old people, too, to play old people’s parts.”
