Harrison Ford Claims That Every Single One of His Performances Was Comedic
There was once a time when it was completely unheard of for a movie star like Harrison Ford to become a series regular on a half-hour TV comedy. The closest we ever came to a Harrison Ford sitcom in the ‘90s was the time the Full House gang briefly attended Disney World’s Indiana Jones stunt show.
But now, Ford is starring in the Apple TV+ show Shrinking, which is about therapists, not laundry or swimming instructors, along with Jason Segel and Jessica Williams. To promote the upcoming second season of the show, Ford recently spoke with Vanity Fair about his pivot to comedy. But, according to Ford, it wasn’t really a pivot at all. “As far as I’m concerned, everything I’ve ever done is comedy,” Ford told the outlet.
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While this may come as a shock to anyone who ever saw Regarding Henry, the movie about an amnesiac who took a bullet to the head, Ford went on to explain that he tried to imbue each one of his parts with some degree of humor. “The jokes really are the surprise in everything, in a serious movie or in a streaming comedy,” Ford said of Witness, the acclaimed drama about a cop hiding out in an Amish community (which admittedly, does sound like the premise of a Tim Allen vehicle).
“Finding the humor in the moment is what makes it survivable for us most of the time,” Ford explained. “I do like to invest characters that I play with their own personal sense of humor. I think everybody has one, even if they’re not funny.”
The Hollywood Homicide star makes a good point, and this approach does come across in some of Ford’s non-comedies. Like how Richard Kimble manages to crack a joke while beating up the guy who murdered his wife.
And judging from this scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy probably took a few improv classes between globe trotting adventures:
But it does feel slightly fallacious to frame Ford’s work in Shrinking as some kind of radical shift for the actor. Ford has appeared in a fair number of comedies throughout the course of his career, from Anchorman 2, to Six Days, Seven Nights, to four seconds of Brüno.
And earlier in his career, Ford starred alongside Gene Wilder in the underrated 1979 Western-comedy The Frisco Kid.
“Some people torture themselves to get comedy to come out. And I kind of felt that Gene was one of those people,” Ford said of his experience on The Frisco Kid. “He was always very serious about his jokes. And a very different personality to Carrie (Fisher) and a very different personality to Will (Ferrell). There are people that are funny that are very different from each other. And I guess there’s room for everybody.”
Unfortunately, Ford neglected to take credit for his pioneering work in the field of fridge-based comedy.
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