The Last Action Hero hams it up

June 1994
GQ Magazine
by Stephanie Mansfield

On location in Mexico, combating boogs, speeders and boredom, laconic, iconic Harrison Ford seeks catharsis. Portuguese actor Joaquim De Almeida, he of the smoldering sensuality, with eyes like Vascleined coffee beans, stands in the doorway of a dusty coffee factory in the tiny Mexican town of Coatepec, where he has come to play Cortez, the villainous cocaine-cartel assassin in Clear & Pre. Danger. He turns his gaze to a production assistant. "Now," he asks, "are we shooting the scene tomorrow where Hareeson keels me?" "Yes, I think it's on the call sheet." "Oh," Joaquim says, his voice dropping. He looks worried. "Do I steel have to fall off the roof into dat beeg woodpile?" "Yes. But they've replaced the logs with balsa." "Well, yes," the actor says with a nod, smoothing his patent-leather black hair with one hand.

He gives a small shudder. "But der will be all deez boogs." When Harrison Ford hears about this exhange, back at his hotel, his fuse is ignited. "Oh, God. We have to get all the bugs we can find. Speeders! Boogs!" He erupts into a wicked belly laugh, slams down his Corona on the patio table and barks an order to Peter Weireter, his bodyguard. "Peter, I will give you a thousand dollars to go out and buy every insect you can find. We need boogs, speeders, snakes!" He leans hack and sighs, punchy with fatigue, then cackles into the cool, cloudless night. "Boogs."

Ford is here in Jalapa reprising his role as CIA analyst Jack Ryan of 1992's Patriot Games. In his jeans and Birkenstocks, and with his thatch of silver-shot hair which appears to have been trimmed with a chain saw he looks more like a stunt double than the icon whose visage has been painted on the side of this posada by worshipful locals. His brow is furrowed, and his nose, which has been broken several times, has come to rest slightly off center on the wide terrain of his face. The two-inch scar (the result of a one-man car crash) that snakes below the generous bottom lip completes the picture of a man who could make flan out of De Almeida and would not only do a cannonball into the woodpile but also ask that nails and broken glass be added.

More than six feet tall, Ford is rangier than he reads on film, with the lean torso of a man decades younger than his 52 years. "I always wanted to be older than I am, and I always wanted to be bald," he says, goofing. "I love what it looks like. It's the coolest thing. You don't have to fuck with hair. I hate hairdressing. Every movie, I try desperately to do something so people aren't fucking picking on One all the time." His muscular arms reveal inky-blue highways of prominent, intersecting veins. "Vascularity," he says in that rumbly voice. "I'd make a great junkie." But Ford is not self-destructive. He's too strong-willed and not in the least self-indulgent, although there's a devil in him riding psychic shotgun barreling down the freeway of life with a six-pack on the passenger seat who relieves those long stretches of self-examination.

In these days of Zen-quoting, ponytailed New Age thugs and bug-fearing, Beretta-toting banditos, Ford's grown-up masculinity is unflinching. Cary Grant once expressed the polarization between his two selves by saying that, at times, even he wished he were Cary Grant. Harrison Ford, on the other hand, is his persona: an ordinary man overcoming adversity through sheer determination and a bit of divine providence. "I have had scientifically provable luck from time to time," he claims. "Being in the right place at the right time and then doing the right thing. You cannot get where I got without luck. Bags of it. Fucking bags of it. You can be as good as I am or better. You can be incredibly more attractive and charming and capable and still be shit out of luck. The only thing that I have done that is not mitigated by luck, diminished by good fortune, is that I persisted. And other people gave up."

Like the gangly tomboy who metamorphoses into a Vogue model, nebbishy Harry Ford, member of his high-school model-train club grew up to be Indiana Jones. It was a brilliant tour de force for a shy, ungainly late bloomer who took up his first sport, tennis, at the age of 45 and was more comfortable behind the wheel of a Volvo than on the back of a horse. In the Star Wars movies, Ford's natural reticence and aloofness played effortlessly off George Lucas's Wookies, robots and androids. His swagger, both physical and intellectual, made him the perfect post-Woodstock antihero. "That is the true nature of my arrogance," he says, "thinking I know what's right." A famously taciturn interview subject, Ford has no stomach for spewathons: Oprah-style confessions of childhood traumas and substance abuse are anathema to him.

He regards the process as "defending your life. That's the part I don't like. Nobody has to be so reflective. Nobody has to spend so much time explaining, defending, posturing, pleasing. It's horseshit. Leave me the fuck alone and lemme make a movie here, and when it comes time to sell it, I'd rather stand on the street corner and say 'Walk this way, good movie and it's cool inside' than have to turn myself inside out because it amuses people to pretend to think they know something about me." He prefers sharing an experience to being interrogated. "You gotta get your boots muddy," he warns at one point, describing the Outward Bound journey to even the least remote reaches of his psyche. His trust is not easily earned. Ever present is the possibility--make that probability--of betrayal.

As Ford stands up to leave following one conversation, he commands "This has all been off the record." Earlier that day, leaning down in his trailer to unlock his weathered brown leather briefcase, he did a quick double take. "Did you memorize that combination?" He will often roll his eyes and cock his head, as if under constant surveillance. In the end, there is a clear and present danger that his security has been threatened, justifying the use of force. "If you write any of this I will come and find you," he says, staring down his interrogator. "I will hunt you down like a dog. I will keel you." Humming a song whose only refrain he can recall is "Sometimes I feel like your old piano stool," Ford doodles on a napkin in his air-cooled trailer. He's a member of the traveling, slightly disfunctional sideshow that has set up its tent in rainy Jalapa, which is doubling for Bogota Colombia. The unreality is heightened by the lack of newspapers, television, mail or any outside confirmation that the work has redeeming value other than to provide a summer cash machine for the studio, which keeps sending harshly worded "meemos" (as Australian director Phillip Noyce calls them), threatening to pull the plug once and for all. The weather forecast is always the same, says Ford: "cloudy with the possibility of a shitstorm."

Sixteen weeks into shooting and two weeks behind schedule (due partially to bad weather), Clear & Pre. Danger is costing Paramount big money. The budget is said to be upwards of $60 million. The film is also costing the cast and crew their sanity. Working six days a week for two months has turned them into zombies, according to Noyce. "Eleven minutes ago, we stopped working on the script," Ford deadpans. Clear & Pre. Danger is Tom Clancy's third hest-seller to hit the screen. (The previous Jack Ryan vehicles, The Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games, have together grossed more than $350 million.) A known sourpuss when it comes to Hollywood, Clancy has complained to The Washington Post that Ford is too old to play Ryan. He also called John Milius's first script for Clear & Pre. Danger "really awful. . .an absolute piece of crap." Ford refuses to get into a pissing match with the author, but the actor claims "I don't give a shit what he says." Nor has Ford committed to extending the franchise: "I don't have to finish this one if I don't like the script."

Because Clancy's techno-prose is a bit dense, Ford and company have tried to clarify the story. Fans of the book may not recognize the movie. "This film is not about great leaps," says Ford. Lethargy has set in, induced by a lack of cultural stimulation and long stretches of inactivity. Cast and crew find themselves driving for miles to places like Leather Town, to purchase snakeskin boots they neither need nor want and will never wear back home. There's talk of rustling up some dirt bikes for the leading man's amusement. (Ford owns several Harleys.) While Ford shares a certain camaraderie with the crew, diffusing tension with Monty Pythonesque asides, he is essentially alone, set apart not by his celebrity but by the demons that drove him to become an actor in the first place. He heads for his trailer when things aren't right. Carelessness is torture to him. "The job, as I understand it, is not to take charge but to take responsibility, because I'm going to end up wearing it anyway," he says. "It has nothing to do with having a clear idea of what is perfect. It is just being willing to dick around and dick around and dick around until it manifestly works."

Says stunt coordinator Dick Ziker, who has known Ford for years, "He changes everything, trying to make it better. He always knows where the camera should be, where his face should be. That's why I have to use him all the time. We have a great stunt double for him, but [the double] never works." The actor likes to do his own stunts. So far in this production, he has hung from a helicopter skid and crashed into a bus in a car going backward at 100 mph. "He scares the shit out of me sometimes," says Ziker. "Harrison does the stunts. I pay the double. That's the way he wants it." "If you fall on the ground, it's a stunt. If you fall on a pad, it's acting," says Ford dismissively. The night before, the American team feted the Mexican crew with a long overdue bacchanal at a small basement bar in Jalapa. The tequila flowed like water from the fire hydrants of Harlem during a heat wave.

A mariachi band wove through the smoke-filled roomw its melodious strains wafting over the crowd. Ford was in an expansive mood, fueled by the knowledge that the shoot was grinding to an end. After insisting he wouldn't dance, he ended up cutting the rug with costar Willem Dafoe. De Almeida, who is big in Brazil, was drunk. "You know," he said woozily, "Hareeson overacts. I mean, you saw him today. You saw him doing dis." He contorts his face into a grotesque expression of fear. It is not unlike the expression Ford had used for a shot that day. "But on-camera, it looks so natural. If I did it like that," he boomed, "dey would laugh me off the set." The next day, Ford says he didn't have fun at the party; it was too crazy. And he couldn't stand in one spot for long without being asked to pose for Polaroids with perfect strangers who will have to insist for years, before the image fades, that the barfly in the "SPAWN TILL YOU DIE" baseball cap, polo shirt and wire-rimmed glasses really is Harrison Ford and not some guy who works for the gas company. Ford wants to go home to Wyoming in the worst way, home to his second wife, screenwriter Melissa Mathison, and his two children, 7-year-old Malcolm and 4-year old Georgia; to his music, hooks and art; to his skiing anal fly-fishing and elk and antelope watching; and to the silence of a man being ignored.

The father of four he has two sons, Ben, 28, and Willard, 26, from his first marriage--and the grandfather of one, he is protective of their and his privacy but not hermetic. He has maintained his quietude because of the simplicity of this lifestyle, which is not all that different from the way he lived in the days when he earned $1,000 a week as a carpenter, although the vacations are better. The son of Dorothy and Christopher Ford an actor turned-advertising executive, Harrison grew up in the suburbs of Chicago with younger brother Terence, whose own acting career was stalled by drug and alcohol problems (Terence is currently in recovery and has recently worked on European soap operas.)

As a boy, Harrison endured regular playground beatings because he was different, quiet and unathletic. "All of my fantasy life as a child was about not being a child. By being out there instead of," he pats his chest, "in here." In high school, he was the social-science club president and Boys Club representative. The yearbook shows a crew-cut kid whose smirk betrays the beginnings of an attitude. After taking up drama at Wisconsin's Ripon College (from which he failed to graduate), Ford honed his skills in summer stock before heading to Hollywood in 1965 with his bride, college flame Mary Marquardt. "I came into a business that was completely fucked," he explains. "They were trying to mold people to be some representation of some other success. I was supposed to be the new Elvis Presley."

Tight-lipped and intimidating in casting interviews, he made no secret of the fact that he found the studio system beneath contempt. His strength was comedy, which is more cerebral than emotional. "His mind controlled everything," recalls Walter Beaked then head of Columbia's new-talent program. And he was no daredevil in those days. "We had to do a tape for a Western that was being cast, and Harrison had to ride a horse. If you could have seen the look of stark terror in his eyes as he bumped along, hanging on for dear life," says Beaked. Bohemian in his lifestyle, Ford was also the best-read of the contract players and smart enough to know that he was not suited to the grooming at hand. "He was on the shitlist, I'll tell you," recalls Beaked. Eventually, he was let go by Columbia, and later by Universal, and took up carpentry as a way to make money, while continuing to pursue his craft. "They tried to kill me off with poisons, sharp sticks and blunt objects, and I was like a fucking snake that grew a new tail. If I had tried to be anybody else, I'd still be trying," he says.

Much has been written about how Ford taught himself carpentry, building Sergio Mendes's recording studio and making bookshelves for John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. But it was casting director Fred Roos who proved to be his best client. He met Ford at Columbia and commissioned various jobs from the laconic actor-carpenter. "Best carpenter I ever had," says Roos, laughing. "And one of the two smartest actors I've ever known." The other is Jack Nicholson. Roos got Francis Ford Coppola to cast Ford in 1973's American Graffiti, and the next year, when Roos and Coppola produced The Conversation, Ford got a small part. In 1977 came Star Wars, and Ford hung up his tools. The following year, he and Mary separated. "He outgrew her," says a friend. "It wasn't because he became a star," says Beaked, whose wife had become friendly with Mary. "He became a looser and wider person. She was very supportive, but the struggling was somehow easier to comprehend than success."

In the mid-Seventies, Roos introduced Ford to Melissa Mathison, whom he wed in 1983. (Mathison wrote The Black Stallion and E.T., just recently surpassed by Jurassic Park as the biggest moneymaker of all time.) Ford has said that he has become a happier person during his second marriage. He's become a better father, too, keeping himself to one film a year to avoid extensive separations from his family. "He's not a Hollywood person," says Mace Neufeld, who produced Patriot Games and has reassumed the duty for its sequel, for which Ford is earning more than $10 million. Ford is very shrewd. After twenty-eight years in the business, he knows exactly what he can and cannot get away with. He doesn't do accents, has never made a sports movie and has shied away from gratuitous sex. His most deeply felt character, the tyrannical father in The Mosquito Coast, was afforded a tepid reception. Audiences don't care for Ford the actor. They'd rather see Ford the movie star. They've come to expect a pithy, sanitized version of the man himself an intelligent guy with a full head of hair.

"I'm not an inventor," he says somewhat defensively. "I'm a storyteller. And it's my job. I'm in it for the money, if you don't mind my saying so. It's what I do for a living. It's not my life." "That's not true," says Neufeld. "That's his own defense mechanism. He loves making movies, and he is a very skilled, serious filmmaker." In fact, Ford is highly inventive, contributing far beyond the scope of his job, eliminating false notes, constantly pushing and prodding, elevating every aspect of a production. His collaborations with Steven Spielberg (the Indiana Jones movies), Peter Weir (Witness) and Mike Nichols (Working Girl) have had exhilarating results. A blessing for a secure director, he can be the bane of an insecure one. "Everybody has to be straight with me about what they really think and they really want. When people try to coddle me or kiss my ass or misdirect me, I can't deal with that. If I feel manipulated, I get extremely angry. I know what skills I have and what skills I don't have. That's not to say I don't want to try and do something I've never done before, but after twenty-eight years, there isn't much that I haven't done a lot of times."

"It's a fastidiousness," observes Phillip Noyce, who also directed Patriot Games and Silver. "He has such an analytical mind that he's more of a collaborator than simply an actor. He's thinking way down deep into the situation. I'm trying to look at the whole table. He's looking at a crumb." Ford's logical bent and emotional detachment are a good fit with the Jack Ryan character. "The beauty of watching Jack interact is wondering when he's going to break. Walking on the edge. And that," says Noyce, "is like Harrison, who is deeply passionate but keeps it in." The obsessive-compulsive behavior that drives Ford's work can be a hindrance in private. Ask him what he least likes about himself, and his face suddenly hardens. "Not letting things go," he says. "I do keep score, and I shouldn't. I direct it inwardly. I don't ever actually seek revenge. I don't believe in it. But my viscera contains this stuff. I have a constant level of stress that is not either necessary or completely healthy. The symptoms are that intimate bystanders will be lightly abused for things that have nothing to do with them."

He has starred in seven of the twenty top-grossing movies of all time, including last year's The Fugitive-which is approaching the $200 million mark. In all, his films have grossed $2 billion domestically, which makes him the most successful actor in the history of the business. "You can have one hit or two hits, but when you start to be as consistent as he has been, it's beyond luck," says Noyce. "He's taking those films the extra distance, which is the difference between mild success and great success." If he tends to repeat himself he's played Han Solo and Indiana Jones each three times (with a fourth Jones possible in the future) and Jack Ryan twice there's a reason.

As Richard Zanuck once said of Gary Cooper, you can't put him in a small hat and get your money back. But for Harrison Ford, the hardest part of moviemaking is committing to a project. Sitting out in the rain-dappled hotel garden after shooting has wrapped for the day, he explains the danger. "The worst part of my job is between the period of time when I say 'This is interesting. I kind of like this script. Maybe it would be good. Ask him whether they have a director. When do they want to go?' " He snaps his fingers sharply. "Might as well have the hat on my fucking head, because in twenty minutes you're gonna have a release date. Not so much because it's Harrison Ford but because there's not enough product."

He pulls on a beer. "The process has gotten out of control. They don't have any faith in a product that isn't made with known ingredients. They check the label and they say 'Wait a minute, what's this?' " Ford keeps his portion of the product in showroom condition, with vigorous workouts ("He's a monster on the bike," says Jake Steinfeld, who has trained the actor) and a low fat, low-cholesterol diet. He injured his knee while making a trailer for The Fugitive and underwent reconstructive surgery last year.

Although his literary tastes run more to Borges than to Tom Clancy, his cinematic tastes are for solid, well-made mainstream fare, with the emphasis on action adventure. He reads a tenth of the scripts he is sent. "By page 20, I can deside if it's got some juice for me emotionally, and if I finish it, I'm very likely to do it. I don't read a script in an hour, the way most people do." He recognizes that his role as a story-teller gives him the chance to have a salubrious effect on people's lives: 'Cathartic' now means you beat the shit out of him in the last reel. I would rather hold [the audience] in the second reel, surprise them in the third and make 'em laugh in the fourth, because they know I'm gonna beat the shit out of him in the twelfth reel. But keep them there, in it, up to that point.

"It may take a lot to get them in the theater," he adds, "but it doesn't take that much to keep them in their seat." He has never directed because, he says, "it's too hard." Is he afraid of failure? "Why not? What else is there to be afraid of? Success? What I'm afraid of is spending the rest of my life making movies. Not having any separation between my life and my job. I can at least get off [a film] at six months. It ain't mine, as much as I say that I have to protect the quality because it's my face.... There's something reasonably tribal about it. There's an alpha dog that's the director. But I'm a bitch in heat.

So he may forget for a while that he's the alpha dog and may suddenly think that his big head is being run by his little head. But that's my job. To seduce the alpha dog" -here he leans forward, his breath almost a hiss-"and make him like it." Back in his trailer, at the end of another twelve-hour day, Ford is trying, as always, to reconcile his two distinct needs. The constant conflict is not, as Jack Ryan would say, between right and wrong but between life and work. At the moment, there is one need that is clear. And present. "Leslie! Where's My Drink?" he bellows. His assistant has poured a paper cup of Absolut, three pearl onions bobbing on the surface, and has left it on the table, with a spoon. He is handed the cup. As Bonnie Raitt's rendition of "Guilty" pipes through the stereo speakers, Ford looks resigned and slightly bemused. "You only want what you ain't got." And what ain't he got? "Peace." Which only comes with death. "That's what I'm expecting," he says, taking a teaspoon of vodka and lifting it to his parched lips, shuddering with mock pleasure. "If I die and I ain't peaceful, then I'm really gonna be pissed off."

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