Harrison Ford has recalled how he told stuntmen to “leave me the fuck alone” while shooting Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny.
The upcoming film marks the fifth and final instalment of the long-running action franchise — which kicked off in 1981 with Indiana Jones And The Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
Now, over four decades after he first appeared in the lead role, Ford will celebrate his 81st birthday shortly after the latest film hits theatres. However, when speaking in a new interview, the acclaimed actor shared that he was determined not to conceal his age in the project.
One moment that highlighted this best, he said, was a scene in Dial Of Destiny in which Jones is riding a horse through the streets of New York City during the 1969 ticker-tape parade that followed the moon landing.
While filming this, Ford explained to Esquire, he felt the hands of multiple stuntmen helping him get off the horse, which irritated him as he wanted the scene to show him dismounting how he normally would.
“I thought, ‘What the fuck?’ Like I was being attacked by gropers. I look down and there’s three stunt guys there making sure I didn’t fall off the stirrup,” he recalled. “They said, ‘Oh, we were just afraid because we thought, you know, and bah bah bah bah.’ And I said, ‘Leave me the fuck alone…L eave me alone, I’m an old man getting off a horse and I want it to look like that!”’
He also explained that he wanted to show his age more in the film, and even made the decision to go shirtless during a scene to emphasise this: “Waking up in my underwear with the empty glass in my hand was my idea.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Ford recalled how he wanted the final instalment of the Indiana Jones franchise to be the most “ambitious” yet.
“I wanted an ambitious movie to be the last one… and I don’t mean that we didn’t make ambitious movies before,” he explained. “They were ambitious in many different ways. But not necessarily as ambitious with the character as I wanted the last one to be.”
Set to arrive in cinemas on June 30, the film marks the first of the series to not be directed by Steven Spielberg, and left critics divided after premiering at Cannes Film Festival.
Directed by James Mangold, the initial plot follows the whip-cracking archaeologist looking to retrieve one half of the Antikythera – an ancient dial built by Archimedes – from a Nazi scientist (played by Mads Mikkelsen) in 1944. The remainder of the film ventures forward to 1969, where Jones partners up with his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) to locate and retrieve the other half, and potentially alter the course of history.
In a four-star review, NME praised the film for delivering the same “dangerous, globetrotting hi-jinks” as in its predecessors, and described it as “a lively, enthralling tale with some particularly emotive scenes in the final act that are bound to cause a tear or two”.