Harrison Ford is known for being one of the world’s biggest movie stars and also for being something of a grump. In other words, he is a gem, and a recent interview he gave proves it.
Ford sat down for a lengthy discussion with The Hollywood Reporter, something he notoriously hates doing and something he openly confirms he hates doing throughout the interview. Despite his strong desire to not talk about himself, he did share some delightful insights, such as what he wanted on his tombstone once he leaves this earthly plane. “I wouldn’t want it to be ‘Harrison Ford, blah-blah-blah, actor,’” he shared. “I’d settle for ‘Was Useful.’” And when the interviewer points out that “Was Useful” is reductive, his response was: “Well, there’s not a lot of space on a tombstone.”
Ford also opined on religion (he was a philosophy major in college) and had this to say about the nature of God, as one does:
There’s a Protestant theologian named Paul Tillich who wrote that if you have trouble with the word “God,” take whatever is central and most meaningful to your life and call that God. My mother was Jewish, my father was Catholic, and I was raised Democrat — my moral purpose was being a Democrat with the big D. But it didn’t apply to a political point of view so much as it applied to nature. I didn’t have any religious construct, but I think nature and God are the same thing. The mysterious origin of life — science tells us how it happened, prophecy tells us another story. I found that everything in nature — the complexity, the biodiversity, the symbiotic relationships — is the same thing other people attribute to God. … Now aren’t you glad you asked that question? You want to get back to the funny shit?
He does talk about funny s*** as well in the interview, including the fact that the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny won’t have any, Wow! Indy is old! jokes. “In [Dial of Destiny] there were a lot of old jokes in the script,” he said. “We took them all out. There is a moment where he observes himself in this situation and says, ‘What the fuck am I doing in here?’ But I hate what I call “talking about the story.” I want to see circumstances in which the audience gets a chance to experience the story, not to be led through the nose with highlights pointed out to them. I’d rather create behavior that is the joke of age rather than talk about it.”
The question of what the f*** are we all doing here goes past aging, of course. And if you want to mull over that question while reading the rest of the interview in its entirety, there are worse ways to fill up a few minutes of your remaining life.
