Few have had a career like Harrison Ford. Blockbusters on top of blockbusters, Harrison Ford‘s made plenty of the best action movies ever, but there was one exec who didn’t quite see the talent.
In an old interview with NBC News on the back of Star Wars movie Return of the Jedi, Ford recalled how his first big screen appearance wasn’t exactly smoothly. He’d a quick walk-on part in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, a 1966 thriller movie led by James Coburn. He got some harsh feedback afterward from the head of new talent.
“He called me into his office and said, ‘I want to tell you a story, kid’,” Ford recalls. “Kid, he always called me Kid. He was about 15 minutes older that I was, he said, ‘First time Tony Curtis was ever in a movie, he delivered a bag of groceries, a bag of groceries, kid. And you took one look at that guy, and you knew that was a movie star’.”
Not quite getting the drift, Ford responded: “Well I thought that was supposed to be a delivery boy!”
The executive fobbed him off as a result. “He said, ‘No no no, go back, learn, study, to be an actor’,” Ford says. “That guy and I, we had the final harsh words on parting from Columbia.”
While that opportunity didn’t work out, 11 years later Ford would play Star Wars character Han Solo in A New Hope. Pop culture would change forever, and then the Indiana Jones movies started. Sometimes it takes more than one crack of the whip.
