As part of its latest series of Force Awakens teasers, EW has a story today attempting to dispel the myth of Harrison Ford as a grumpty-grump who doesn’t actually like Star Wars. They do this with a series of cute stories from the Force Awakens set about how the real-life Han Solo is actually a total sweetheart. Get ready to set your target for Awww-deraan.
He had an emotional first day on set.
When Ford wandered onto the Millenium Falcon for the first time in three decades, the hundreds of surrounding cast and crew were struck silent by the weight of the moment. So, too, was the actor himself. “Harrison was going through his own experience, finding that place for himself again, to return to something that had been so much a part of his identity and acting career,” Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy tells the mag. “It was his own little personal journey, but once he got there, it was amazing. I mean, he was Han Solo again. That’s why everybody else got so quiet! They were like, ‘Oh my God, he’s back!’”
He didn’t let his injury slow him down.
In a regrettable oversight — there’s no OSHA in space — Ford’s leg was broken during filming when a piece of the Millennium Falcon set fell on him. After the accident, J.J. Abrams considered making Han the galaxy’s sitting-down-iest smuggler, only to find it wasn’t necessary. “[T]here are some places where he’s more active than he was prior to the accident,” the director says. “As you’ll see in the movie, he is running and doing more physical activity in this movie than I think anyone who knows he was injured would expect … he blew everyone’s minds.”
He gave Peter Mayhew the world’s biggest Wookie-hug.
If you’re not convinced that Harrison Ford actually enjoyed making the original trilogy, here’s a story about Ford’s reunion with his old co-star Peter Mayhew. The cast had come together for dinner shortly before production got under way, and no one was sure exactly how close Ford was with the man who had stood beside him in a Wookie suit all those years ago. Here’s how Kennedy describes what happened next: “Harrison came into the room and Peter was sitting down, he just went over and gave him the biggest hug, and you could just see that there had been this incredible relationship between these two.”
In general, he was a total mensch.
If a door fell on you at work, you’d have a right to be pissed off when you came back. But Ford wasn’t. In the words of writer Lawrence Kasdan, “[W]hen Harrison came back, he lit up the whole place. And he was so funny and warm and helpful to the young people, and generous with his old costars.” Harrison Ford — he’s nice now!
