The 80-year-old Harrison Ford has been keeping very, very busy.
Aside from starring in “1923,” an American Western drama that is the prequel to Paramount Network’s “Yellowstone,” Ford wrapped up Apple TV+’s latest series “Shrinking,” where he plays a serious-faced therapist with Parkinson’s, anchoring the show well.
Then there is his debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — another can of worms. The actor is set to take over the role of General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, previously played by the late William Hurt, in the upcoming “Thunderbolts” and “Captain America: New World Order.”
“I thought, ‘Everybody else seems to be having a great time.’ I watch all these terrific actors having a good time,” Ford said of his role in the Marvel movies in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I like doing something different to what I’ve ever done and pleasing people with it. So I’ll try a piece of that.”
But that’s not all. Ford is set to appear in another “Indiana Jones” movie, set in the 1960s, released 15 years after the fourth installment, “Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull.” While plot details are unknown, reportedly, the actor was de-aged for the movie.
Why was Harrison Ford being de-aged?
Ford was made younger by using software that went through the archival footage and matched it to what was recently shot.
“Because I did a bunch of movies for them, they have all this footage, including film that wasn’t printed. So they can mine it from where the light is coming from, from the expression,” Ford said in an interview with Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show.”
“I don’t know how they do it. But that’s my actual face,” Ford continued. “Then I put little dots on my face and I say the words and they make (it). It’s fantastic.”
Director James Mangold had a vision and a goal to give his viewers “an adrenaline blast.”
“I wanted the chance to dive into this kind of full-on George-and-Steven old picture and give the audience an adrenaline blast,” he told Empire in an interview. The idea was to go back in time to a castle swarmed by Nazis in 1944, featuring a younger Ford, wearing the original “Raiders” jacket, in an era later than “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” set nearly a decade earlier.
“And then we fall out, and you find yourself in 1969,” Mangold explained. “So that the audience doesn’t experience the change between the ’40s and ’60s as an intellectual conceit, but literally experiences the buccaneering spirit of those early days … and then the beginning of now.”
What is the fifth ‘Indiana Jones’ movie about?
It is set amid the space race in 1969. Ford’s co-star in the movie, Mads Mikkelsen, said the movie is “going heavily back to the first and second film and getting that original feel, the original Indy, something dense and epic,” as Margaret Darby reported.
While plot details aren’t available yet, the movie also stars Boyd Holbrook, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Antonio Banderas and Toby Jones, among others.
“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is set to release on June 30.