First things first, movie fans. Just as soon as a good script materializes, Harrison Ford says he’d be “happy as pie” to make the fifth Indiana Jones movie. Now you know.
Ford, 67, was in Toronto late last week to promote his new movie, Extraordinary Measures, a family drama that co-stars Brendan Fraser and Keri Russell. The movie, which opens nationally in theatres on Friday, concerns the real-life struggle faced by John and Aileen Crowley, a married couple who turned their lives upside down to find a cure for Pompe disease, the neuromuscular disorder killing two of their children.
Ford plays the anti-social research scientist whose discoveries are central to the Crowley’s quest. The actor says he’s always on the lookout for good roles he can play, “good roles with good movies surrounding them,” to be specific. Extraordinary Measures fit the bill.
Ford is also an executive producer of the movie, so he nurtured it from start to finish. He also says that these days, the best way to get the role you want is to develop the project yourself.
“If this had been on the open market, they probably would have cast John Malkovitch in my role,” Ford says, just slightly tongue in cheek. “You know what I mean — a scientist, an academic scientist. I might not have thought of myself if I hadn’t been part of the making of it.”
Ford is probably the only person on the planet who wouldn’t have thought of himself for the role in Extraordinary Measures. The man has played everything, from space buccaneer Han Solo and archeologist action hero Indiana Jones to espionage agent Jack Ryan, not to mention turns as cop, president, replicant hunter, villainous husband, cowboy, student, businessman, lawyer, tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. His career spans more than 40 years and more than 40 movies.
“I always thought,” Ford says, “that what would allow me to have some kind of shelf life is being useful in a variety of different genres, playing a number of different kinds of character.”
Done.
On the home front, Ford has four children from his two previous marriages and is currently raising a little boy with his fiance, Calista Flockhart. He’s also a grandfather, as both of his oldest children have children of their own.
The actor has been on every imaginable celebrity top 100 list — for earning power, for sex appeal, for good looks, for movie stardom, for charitable endeavors, for environmental work and for being a hero, in reel life and in real. (Ford, a skilled pilot, rescued a climber from Table Mountain in Wyoming a few years ago.) He has Oscar and Golden Globe nominations and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Forbes Magazine just reported last week that he and Miss Flockhart were the No. 2 earning couple in all of entertainment last year, right behind Jay-Z and Beyonce.
You could call him an icon. But I wouldn’t ...
“Isn’t that a useless term,” says Ford, mildly. “That’s an outside-in view of what I do. I don’t do iconography. I don’t do movie star. I do story telling. And by dint of the fact that I’ve been around for so long, by dint of the fact that I’ve played characters who’ve had such successful films surrounding them from time to time, that’s a word one could attach. But it doesn’t make any sense and it doesn’t mean anything to me.
“The creepiest thing of all is to lose your anonymity. It’s a thing you have to face every day, having to deal with the fact that you’re not passing through the world like everybody else is. You’re not in the position which is the ideal position for an actor to be in: an observer. You are the observed. You deal with it, and certainly you’re grateful for the opportunities that come along with that, but it’s the worst thing of all.”
liz.braun@sunmedia.ca
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