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A few months ago, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I started watching “Shrinking,” the Apple TV show in which Harrison Ford plays Dr. Paul Rhoades, the unlikely patriarch of a makeshift family of therapists in his practice and all the people in their lives. It is firmly in the “Ted Lasso” dramedy vein, one where the comedy can sometimes hinder the drama, and vice-versa, allowing difficult ideas to go down a little too easy, though such sentimentality is counterbalanced by Ford’s irascible vulnerability. Everything that Ford is blossoms in the role of Paul, so much so that the character’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s forcing him to confront his mortality feels on some level like it is preparing us all for the eventuality of Ford’s death. I don’t mean to be dark. There is something refreshing about such honesty in our age of longevity-obsessed bros and Ford, after all, is the one who thought Han Solo should be killed off all the way back in “Return of the Jedi,” demonstrating that he already knew in a way that so many do not that not everything is meant to last forever. What’s more, in recently accepting the SAG-AFTRA Lifetime Achievement Award, Ford nodded at that reality too. “I am in a room of actors,” he began his acceptance speech by saying, “many of whom are here because they have been nominated to receive a prize for their amazing work while I’m here to receive a prize for being alive.” In that moment, taking a beat after the self-deprecating punchline for a deadpan stare, it was hard not to think: the old guy’s still got it.
To a person of my generation, Ford is a big deal, having starred in touchstones whose names do not even need mentioning. Roles like Han Solo and Indiana Jones are iconic, but they became iconic later. He made them what they were, and he was virtually inextricable from them, and it’s why I’m almost positive that he was the first actor, nay, movie star whose name I really, truly knew. Now, the line on movie stars is that their persona tends to overwhelm the role, and while Ford’s characters almost always have that same gruff, laconic exterior, he creates interiors, too, as he did in the (more than middling) thriller masterpiece “The Fugitive.” He spends so much of that movie alone, and yet we also not only always know what his character is thinking but who he is. Ford’s pause before his character leaps off the dam turns a stunt set piece into an emotional leap of faith, the nexus of movie star acting. His craft tends to disappear before your eyes, which is why, I suspect, he never won an Oscar and was only nominated once; those fellow Academy actors like to see the acting.
There was no bigger box office star in the 80s, and there were only a handful of box office stars in the 90s who were bigger, but as the industry changed in the new millennium, turning its attention to superheroes and more youth-oriented franchises, it was hard not to feel Ford’s star dim. He spent a couple decades starring in vanishing middle-class movies that felt like they were transplanted from the 80s and 90s (“Firewall,” “Morning Glory,”) and hawking bottled nostalgia in the new Indiana Jones movie and the new “Star Wars” trilogy. Where once he helped to create something new and invigorating, now he seemed to struggle from lack of a better idea. In 2010, one line in the “Extraordinary Measures” trailer turned him into a meme, and it felt like a demarcation between generations, one that remembered who he had been and one that wasn’t sure what to make of this curmudgeonly old coot. He finally conceded in 2025 and appeared in “Captain America: Brave New World,” the fourth movie in the “Captain America” series. Reviews were mixed.
That movie was an extension of a TV series, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” evoking the blurring lines between the big screen and the small screen in our current entertainment landscape, a reality that Ford seemed to acknowledge by returning to scripted television for the first time since his big break. I don’t want to turn this into another movies versus TV debate, but I had always hoped that Hollywood could mount one more movie project worthy of Ford to give him a proper send-off. Yet, appropriately for someone essentially self-taught as an actor, he manifested that send-off for himself in his SAG-AFTRA Lifetime Achievement acceptance speech. In briefly remembering his own career while noting the whole purpose of SAG in the first place as protection and fellowship, he gave something that sounded a lot like a Hollywood farewell address. Even more than that, it was how he gave it. We live in an era of attention-seeking bluster and noise and yet, here was Ford with an innate master class in acting on camera, effortlessly drawing and holding the attention of everyone watching without raising his voice or over-exaggerating, epitomizing a movie star’s sense of presence. The pictures have gotten smaller, that’s indisputable, and Ford is living proof, but in that moment, he still felt larger than life.
