Imagine, for a moment, that you are Harrison Ford. You are 82 years old. People still think you’re sexy, and rightly so. You are Han Solo, you are Indiana Jones; you were in Blade Runner, The Fugitive, motherfucking Air Force One. You are the Princess Diana of men of a certain age.
You have taken a lucrative payday with Marvel Studios. Well, it seemed like a lot of fun, so why not? You’re playing the president (again) and he’s got a cool name: Thaddeus Ross. William Hurt used to play him. Can’t be all bad! The summer prior to the release of the movie, Captain America: Brave New World, you are contractually obligated to go to a thing called “Comic Con.” It goes down well. You hulk out (Thaddeus Ross is Red Hulk, by the way). You have more fun! The nerds love it!
And then, someone asks: “Who deals better with snakes—Indy or Thaddeus Ross?”
The thing about Harrison Ford is that he’s not exactly known for entertaining bullshit. He will tell it as it is, and this reputation precedes him. One article in The Telegraph describes Ford as “Hollywood’s greatest curmudgeon.” A piece by Pajiba lists his “12 Most Delightfully Crotchety Answers From His Reddit AMA.” In 2015, a New York Post headline called him an “anti-star.” This isn’t the whole picture: he is a man of many moods, such as we saw in the viral video of his watery eyes after a journalist thanked him for his work on Indy 5. But it does convey the air of ambivalent grumpiness with which he has become known to carry himself.
So just imagine his collision with the MCU, which is famously more convoluted—and much, much sillier, and carries with it much more bullshit—than the blueprint for a nuclear warhead. Marvel-heads asking him about “multiverses,” “sacred timelines” and “secret wars.” The blank stares! The contemptuous sneers! The utter befuddlement! As a person who enjoys unfolding chaos like the first sip of a crisp pint—which is to say, as a human being with a beating heart—inject it directly into my veins.
His first stop on the Brave New World tour did not disappoint. Take his answer to that aforementioned question about snakes, posed by Entertainment Weekly in conversation with the movie’s cast:
“I’ve always treated these questions with the utmost respect and somehow, at the same time, complete disdain. I will not answer that stupid question,” he said, getting laughs out of his fellow cast members in the room. “But thank you. Delighted to have the opportunity.”
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