Indiana Jones is back, with Harrison Ford in the role for the last time, and Esquire caught up with the actor for two days in LA, in his airplane hangar, at his house — drinking bourbon and talking about what really matters in life.
In this excerpt, Ford talks about why he decided to come back and make another Indiana Jones film.
Why make another Indiana Jones movie, filmed when he was pushing eighty? “I wanted an ambitious movie to be the last one,” he says. “And I don’t mean that we didn’t make ambitious movies before—they were ambitious in many different ways. But not necessarily as ambitious with the character as I wanted the last one to be.”
Early in The Dial of Destiny, there’s a scene in which Jones is riding a horse on a subway platform in Manhattan. As Ford finished the scene, he felt hands all over his legs and, he says, “I thought, What the fuck? Like I was being attacked by gropers. I look down and there’s three stunt guys there making sure I didn’t fall off the stirrup. They said, Oh, we were just afraid because we thought, you know, and bah bah bah bah. And I said, Leave me the fuck alone, I’m an old man—”
He’s raising his voice now.
“Sorry.” He lowers his voice, but his fingers are drumming like mad. “Leave me alone, I’m an old man getting off a horse and”—loud voice again, he can’t help it—“I want it to look like that!”
There’s another moment in The Dial of Destiny: Indiana Jones is in hand-to-hand combat with the villain on a speeding train, and he holds his famous hat over the villain’s face before punching him, as if to take him by surprise. It’s a brilliant bit of Jonesian theatrics, and it was Ford’s idea—the kind of thing only he would think of, having inhabited Jones for so long.
Over a fifty-year career and an eight-decade life, Ford had banged himself up from time to time—snowboards, horses, stunts. Something must have weakened his shoulder, because when he held his hat in the face of actor Mads Mikkelsen and pulled his hand back to demonstrate the punch—someone was in the way and he had to adjust mid-strike—Ford pulled the subscapularis muscle off his right shoulder. Production shut down for two weeks, and Ford had to sit out an extra six weeks after that.
“Well,” I offer, “you’ve always been known for doing so many of your own action scenes.”
“Yeah, well, I’m also known for shutting movies down because I get hurt, which is not something you want to be known for. But hey, shit happens.”
Read the interview in full here, and see Ford in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in the UK and Ireland from June 28th, 2023, and two days later in the USA.
