Harrison Ford loves "pretending to be somebody else"
The 83-year-old star is one of the highest-grossing actors in the world, but Harrison never really planned to become a Hollywood icon
31 July 2025
Harrison told Variety: "I'd been to college, and I hadn't made a success of my academic career. At the beginning of my junior year, I looked for something in the course catalogue that would help me get my grade point average up, and I came across drama.
"The first line of the paragraph that described the course said, 'You read and discuss plays,' and I thought, 'I can do that.' I didn't read all the description - typical of me in those days - because the last few lines described that the course also required you to be part of the school plays for that academic year. I hadn't ever done anything like that before, so I was shocked by that part of it.
"But I quickly recognised that I loved telling stories. I liked dressing up and pretending to be somebody else. And the people that I met had a similar bent, people that I might have overlooked. They're people that probably hadn't been really seen before, for who they are, for what they were - and they were storytellers."
Asked if acting helped him to feel "seen", Harrison replied: "No, it made me feel truly unseen. Because I was able to hide behind the character, and that was the first freedom I really felt."
Harrison has been married to actress Calista Flockhart since 2010, and although he would love to work with his wife, he would always want it to be "someone else's idea".
The veteran film star said: "If we get to work together, we'd want it to be someone else's idea. That kind of casting might not be the best way to bring people into an imagined situation, because [audiences] may say, 'Oh, I know they're married; now I'm not even thinking about the movie anymore.'"
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