Harrison Ford Explains Why He Has No Plans to Retire from Acting: ‘I Love to Feel Useful’
Harrison Ford simply isn’t ready to retire from Hollywood.
As Ford appeared on Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?, set to air Friday, the 80-year-old Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny actor told host Chris Wallace, “I don’t do well when I don’t have work,” when asked whether he’s given retirement any thought.
“I love to work. I love to feel useful. It’s my jones,” Ford, who turns 81 next month, said during the interview. “I want to be helpful.”
“It is the people that you get to work with,” he continued, when Wallace asked what aspects of making movies he loves. “The intensity and the intimacy of collaboration. It’s the combined ambition somehow forged from words on a page. I don’t plan what I want to do in a scene, and I don’t feel obliged to do anything. But I am, I guess, naturally affected by the things that I work on.”
Elsewhere in the appearance, Wallace asked Ford about what he meant by saying he desired the new movie to be “ambitious” in his final turn as Indiana Jones. The actor said he wanted the film to “confront the question of age straight-on, not to hide my age, but to take advantage of it in the telling of the story.”
“I feel very strongly that it does [pull it off],” he added, before noting: “It’s time for me to grow up,” as he moves on from the longtime action-adventure franchise.
“Six years ago, I thought maybe we ought to take a shot at making another one. And I wanted it to be about age because I think that rounds out the story that we’ve told and we’ve brought it to the right place,” he said, opining that 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull did not end with “a real strong feeling of the conclusion or the closure that I always hoped for.”
“Speaking to this issue of age, not making jokes about it, but but making it a real thing,” Ford added of his desire for the new film.
When Ford — who has been filming scenes for the next Captain America movie lately — spoke with PEOPLE recently, he said he has not lost any of his love for the film industry.
“I probably enjoy making movies more now than I ever did,” he said. “I don’t want to be young again. I was young, and now I enjoy being old.”
Ford, who told PEOPLE he finds “a certain ease” in aging, appears to remain humbled by his own success almost 50 years since he first collaborated with Indiana Jones and Star Wars creator George Lucas on 1973’s American Graffiti.
“No one ever believes this, but I never wanted to be rich and famous,” he said recently. “I just wanted to be an actor.”
His recent TV roles include the Yellowstone spinoff 1923 and the Apple TV+ comedy Shrinking.
New episodes of Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace? are available Friday mornings on Max and air at 10 p.m. ET on CNN. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is in theaters June 30.
