He might not be the first person you think of when the topic of comedic actors is discussed, but think about it – Harrison Ford has been wry, sardonic, knowingly dry and on occasion flat-out funny and here Vanity Fair take a look at this underrated quality of Hollywoods greatest ever leading man as he dives into season 2 of Shrinking on Apple+.
It took the Apple TV+ comedy series Shrinking, in which Ford plays a gruff senior therapist at a clinic opposite Jason Segel and Jessica Williams, to highlight that the actor everyone considered the thinking man’s action hero was really a comedian at heart. “I’m a silly person,” Ford says—as seriously as possible. (Maybe he was pointing his finger too. We were on the phone.)
Shrinking returns for season two on October 16, so Ford fans will soon see him jabbing even more holes in his staid exterior with that pointing finger of his. “It’s always so interesting how the narrative gets formed, right? Because it’s out of your control. And the narrative on this show has been, ‘Who knew that Harrison Ford could do a comedy?’” says Shrinking cocreator Bill Lawrence, whose other credits include Ted Lasso and Scrubs. “It is crazy. He’s a comedic actor.”
Lawrence insists that of course he and fellow Shrinking creators Segel and Brett Goldstein knew the now 82-year-old actor had the requisite absurdity in him. “When we wrote the script, we wrote a ‘Harrison Ford’ type because I have been around long enough to have seen him in Working Girl. If Indiana Jones did not have a comedic self-awareness, the movie would not have worked. If Star Wars didn’t have an inherent comedic cockiness to that character in such an earnest movie, it wouldn’t have worked,” Lawrence says. “So I knew Harrison Ford was funny, man. I’d seen him be funny a bazillion times.”
