The other reason this birthday is weird, and I promise I mean it with affection, is that it looks like she’s been 80 for decades. Because, in an industry where everyone from 25 and up is possessed by a horrible desperation to cling to their youth for life, distorting their faces with unnecessary surgeries to try to trick the world into believing they’re somehow frozen Over time, Ford has embraced the role of the grizzled elder statesman like no other. You don’t see that much in his movies. On the rare occasion he does make them, he still tends to play the tough guys who throw them out of windows (and then, as a trained carpenter, he helps rebuild the window between takes). Even in his most recent film, 2020’s The Call of the Wild, Ford exuded a kind of low-key, lived-in charisma that most other actors can only dream of achieving. No, Ford’s real inner old man is more likely to come out to play in his TV appearances. My favorite of these is his meeting with David Blaine. While Blaine’s hitting often results in jumps, historically bemoaning his scars, his meeting with Ford in 2013 couldn’t have been quieter. Throughout their meeting, which seems to take place in Ford’s kitchen, Blaine’s noisy mystical nonsense is met with a wall of silence. At no point can you tell if Ford is amused, bored, or surprised by Blaine’s deception. He speaks only once or twice, confirming details and announcing the name of the card he has chosen. When Blaine’s trick ends with the usual flourish (the playing card was inside a fruit the whole time), Ford looks him in the eye and growls, “Get out of my house.” It is perfect. It deserves to be the clip he is remembered for. There is also his cabbage joke. During a David Letterman appearance early last decade, Ford launched into a long, wordless joke about a man who wants to buy half a cabbage. It goes on for about a minute and a half, with Letterman looking on—as Ford did with Blaine—as if he doesn’t know whether to be amused or worried, until he finally stumbles into what in some parts of the world could be interpreted as a punchline. . The audience titters politely, the band beats triumphantly, and Ford gets up indignantly and begins to chew out the bandleader for not having finished telling the joke. The actual punchline is sad, but that’s beside the point. Ford has established himself as a cranky old man, and that’s all that matters. Part of that wrinkly persona is his ability to stay two or three beats behind everyone else, as if he’s slowly catching on to a joke that everyone else stopped laughing at long ago. My favorite example is when, with his Blade Runner co-star Ryan Gosling, he was interviewed by This Morning’s Alison Hammond. At first, Ford remains aloof and taciturn, while Hammond jokes with Gosling. But then his ears are pulled, he smiles and – to everyone’s delight – he begins to joke. Raid the mini bar. At one point Gosling leaves to help the crew. At the end of the interview, Ford doubles over with laughter. It just goes to show that a worn persona is one thing, but even Harrison Ford isn’t impervious to Alison Hammond. Happy birthday Harrison.
