(Credit: Universal Pictures)
Sat 10 January 2026 14:45, UK
As one of cinema’s great tough guys, whether he’s battling Nazis as Indiana Jones, blasting Stormtroopers as Han Solo, or finding his way to plane crashes as himself, Harrison Ford has been in numerous sticky situations and always come out on top, with one of his toughest characters a product of one of his strangest and least successful movies.
In 2020, he starred in The Call of the Wild, an adaptation of Jack London’s novel set in the tundras of Canada at the end of the 19th century, playing John Thornton, a grizzled frontiersman who, despite his age, can more than handle himself in any situation. He’s not the star of the picture, though, which goes to one of his weirdest co-stars ever: a computer-generated dog played by a human named Terry Notary, and it’s just as strange as it sounds.
As previously alluded to, The Call of the Wild was a total bomb, wherein critics struggled to get on board with the bizarre CGI, placing it firmly in the ‘uncanny valley’. The film’s release date of late February 2020, weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic sent the world into lockdown, resulted in a loss of between $50 to $100million for 20th Century Studios, but Ford couldn’t care less. According to an interview with Pipeline Artists, the Hollywood icon loved working on the film because it allowed him to be himself.
“That’s the edited me,” he said of Thornton, “That’s a curated collection of the aspects of my personality, my understanding, my conviction. And that’s not always what you’re dealing with in the portrayal of a character, but that’s the fit in this case. Fits like a glove.”
I can’t pretend to know the man personally, but from looking at Ford’s life, I’d say this statement is accurate, for Thornton has a great respect for the natural world, as does his actor.
Ford has campaigned for environmental causes for years, once angering the Indonesian government by questioning their commitment to conservation, to the point where they threatened to deport him, and he has several species of animals named after him, including (ironically) a snake.
Perhaps the way in which Ford and Thornton are most similar is that they enjoy spending time alone; in every single interview I’ve seen with Ford, he looks like he’d rather be anywhere else, clearly detesting doing press.
Some of this attitude might be exaggerated, but it clearly comes from a genuine place, such that, given the choice, he would almost certainly spend his days in solitude, flying his planes or knocking around his ranch. He probably wouldn’t be super keen on panning for gold in a frozen wasteland, but the essence is the same.
While every actor would love all of their movies to be well-received box office toppers, that’s not what it’s all about. With The Call of the Wild, Ford was able to explore a side of himself rarely seen on film, and was undoubtedly also paid a small fortune to do so.
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