I’m no political semiotician, but I sense something afoot in early footage of Captain America: Brave New World. At least one character is reticent to work with the incoming president of the United States. He respects the office and all that, but this Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross is beyond the pale. He’s a loose cannon. He’s a rogue. Later in the footage – you all know this already – we learn that Ross transforms into a furious orange behemoth.
Okay, this variation on the Hulk is actually red, but you can see where I’m going with this. So does Harrison Ford. Nobody has yet made any explicit comparisons with the 47th (and 45th) president. But the veteran actor, who looks to be having great fun as old Thunderbolt, is ready to stomp on queries as to what the film has to tell us about contemporary American politics.
“Nothing! This is a movie,” he says.
A longish pause is allowed to gather.
“That’s politics. The idea of this character. The notion of this political reality that the film illustrates ...”
He leans forward and (a pro for 60 years) adopts a dramatic stage whisper.
“It’s ... an ... entertainment. It’s not based on any reality that you may feel obliged as a journalist to supply. I understand that responsibility, and I honour it. But that’s not why I came. That’s not what I’m doing.”
We should clarify Ford’s tone. In decades past, journalists have misinterpreted the actor’s sardonic humour for a school of grumpiness. It was not until he reached his golden years that everyone finally got the joke. He is now seen as an untouchable performer on TV chatshows and in interviews. Nobody is better at raising a weary eyebrow at the absurdity of the promotional circus.
The big top doesn’t get any bigger than the one erected for the latest release in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That colossal enterprise is going through what we might politely call a transitional phase. In 2023 the franchise delivered the indifferently performing Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the successful Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 and the disastrous The Marvels. (Guardians made nearly $200 million more than the other two combined.)
But hold on. Last summer Deadpool & Wolverine went ballistic at the box office, taking more than €1.2 billion.
So, is everything sorted? Well, maybe. The worry for Disney, the MCU’s overlord, is that the older, more established heroes are still performing while much of the next generation – hello, The Marvels and (remember them?) Eternals – are floundering.
Baton handovers do come off. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man films have done splendidly. That was, however, a reboot. No Spider-Man had previously existed in the official MCU. (Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire were on different timelines for another studio.)
Can Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson work as an acknowledged successor to Chris Evans’s Steve Rogers in the “job” of Captain America? Wilson first appeared as the Falcon in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, from 2014, and was elevated to his current status on the TV show The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
“I never, when I signed on, to be Sam Wilson – and be a part of the MCU – saw this coming,” Mackie, a charismatic actor, tells me. “I never thought that Chris Evans would not be Captain America, because that was his role.”
The appearance of Ford as Thunderbolt Ross will do nothing but good for the sequence. Taking over from the late William Hurt in the role, Ford gets to play an irritable, martially minded blowhard who, in the Marvel comics, has acted as antagonist to the (regular, green) Hulk since John F Kennedy was president. As the MCU moves forward it helps to have a representative of older Hollywood front and forward.
“I was nervous at first, and Harrison pulled me to the side and said, ‘Relax,’” Mackie says of their partnership. “After that we were off to the races. It was funny. I didn’t know what to expect. I was very nervous about meeting Harrison Ford.”
He adopts an ancient growl.
“You know, he talks like this. Ha ha! So I was, like, ‘Oh, he’s going to be a grumpy dude. He’s going to yell at us all day.‘ But he came to set, and I was so surprised just how nice of a man he was. He would joke with everybody on the crew and spend time with us.”
That has been pretty much my experience with Ford over the years. We last met at Cannes in 2023, when he charmed the room with an expected ironic weariness and more surprising misty-eyed sentimentality. As Han Solo in Star Wars and Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, he helped invent the contemporary franchise movie and, therefore, deserves the honour of a senior role in the biggest series going.
“I was looking to be a part of a film that was made for a different kind of audience than I had ever really had the opportunity of telling a story to,” he says. “I was seeing how successful the films were and how much they have been enjoyed by their fans. I thought it was an intriguing area to explore. They brought me a part which I thought was a little taste of every bit of the imagination and pleasure of a Marvel film. To play the president and to play the Red Hulk.”
We will allow the film itself to explain how president Ross gets to transform into a giant mass of rubicund rage. More than a few observers have raised eyebrows at the notion of Harrison Ford – a master of dry distance as Han and Indy – embracing full-on computer-generated comic-book madness. Was he ever before offered a superhero part? Of course they weren’t really a thing when he first broke through, in the 1970s.
“Nope. I have never been offered a flying suit or superpowers,” he says. “I have only been equipped to play a president. No superpowers.”
Ford conveys no sense of regret that such roles didn’t come his way. Why would he? Born in Chicago 82 years ago, the actor has manoeuvred his way through the Hollywood morass with great skill and great dignity. He struggled a tad in his 20s – famously taking work as a professional carpenter – before landing smaller roles in George Lucas’s American Graffiti and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.
At the age of 35 he was, in 1977, the one true breakout performer from Star Wars. Producers recognised a craggy suaveness that would have persuaded in any generation. He would have worked in a John Ford flick. He works in an MCU flick. Has there ever been a plan? Has there ever been a checklist?
“It’s not a mathematical equation,” he says. “There’s just a lot of serendipity – what’s available for me to do when I feel like working. What have I already done that’s like that? Do I want to do it again? There is a whole complex set of things. It’s not as simple as just saying, ‘Oh, I get to play a hero’.
“There are good people in the film. The script is fine. There is a life somewhere in here that has to be observed and fostered. Time must be spent with that. I always want to be involved with people who are ambitious and are good at what they do.”
There is no sign of him slowing down. It is encouraging how many top-flight industry folk still want to work with Ford. He is currently grizzled opposite Helen Mirren in the western series 1923, for Paramount+, and vulnerable in the hit comedy Shrinking, for Apple TV+.
Those shows offer us a reminder that – not one of those stars who works to a “type” – Ford has always been willing to flex from drama to romp. One year he is the comic foil in Working Girl. The next he is the action hero in The Fugitive. Now he’s a deeply flawed leader in a Marvel film.
“I’ve never set out with an ambition to play only positive characters,” Ford says. “I have always found people in my own experience to be complicated – some good parts, some parts not so good. But that’s not what concerns me.
“What concerns me is what part does that character play in the telling of the story overall? So, to be an efficient part of a story, it doesn’t matter to me whether it’s a good guy or a bad guy. I just want to have the opportunity to help tell a story.”
Few satisfactory models exist for Ford’s career. Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who together cemented his stardom in Star Wars and Indiana Jones, are both huge fans of classical Hollywood, but Ford also then seemed immediately modern. Han Solo was a cowboy with a laser blaster. Jones was a mid-century adventurer with a postmodern self-awareness. “I’m making this up as I go,” that character famously quipped. One feels that went for Ford himself.
“Who inspired me? Whoever I was working with,” he says. “The other actors. The words on the page. The idea behind it. I don’t work from inspiration. I work from detail, from assembling pieces. It’s nice to have a bit of inspiration, but some assembly is still required. Batteries not included. Ha ha!”
Is he still learning from those around him? I imagine, on a film such as Brave New World, everyone will be looking to Ford for inspiration rather than the other way around.
“I don’t know that I want to make myself responsible for nominating something that I learned from somebody,” he says. “I think we all learn from each other. And we learn mostly from our own mistakes. But what you learn is how to work together – to make something that’s durable, that makes sense to other people.”
We hardly need to ask if he still gets satisfaction from the work. Should Ford so wish, he could comfortably retire to an Italian villa with the wife and any adult children who need a room. He began dating the actor Calista Flockhart in 2002. They were married in 2010 and have raised an adopted son together. He has four children from two previous relationships.
That counts as a full life. Clearly, love for the craft draws him back, but I suspect the former carpenter also has a formidable work ethic. You see that in the laid-back gusto (if that’s not a tautology) he brings to these promotional duties.
“I always get support from my wife and my family. I mean, they ...”
He furrows his brow in concentration, still eager to make sense of it all. Another longish pause.
One of my journo colleagues points out that “she’s an actor too”.
“I knew that! I knew that!” he says, with withering comic punch. “She’s a wonderful actor, but she doesn’t dabble in my assignments and I don’t dabble in hers. So her support is for the machinery, not for the character.”
He really is brilliant at this. I can’t work out to what extent he is consciously playing a crotchety geezer for laughs – drawing us into his trap – and to what extent an enduring taste for gravelly humour has just found its natural octogenarian home. A lifelong liberal Democrat, he is certainly skilled at evading any efforts to connect his current character to his current president.
“In history, there have been a variety of presidents,” he says. “Some of them are judged to be good presidents. And some of them are judged to not be as good. This is not about a good president or a bad president. This is about the president that is part of this story. This is not an instruction book for any current or future presidents to use to knit together a government.”
Have we got that?
“This is just a story about a bunch of guys in suits who can fly.”
We’ve got that. The message is that there is no message. But still.
Captain America: Brave New World is in cinemas from Friday, February 14th
