Age is nothing but a number when you’re Harrison Ford. During a May 19 press conference for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at the 76th annual Cannes film festival, a forward reporter had some very flattering words for the 80-year-old actor.
“Look, I think you are still very hot,” she said, which prompted laughter from others in the room. “And we were stunned to see you take your shirt off in the second scene. I mean, and you’ve still got it. How do you keep fit and you really…will you ride? Can you ride a horse?” The resulting laughter caused Ford to ask the reporter to repeat the last part of her question. “Can you ride a horse?” she repeated. “Which you, you did right, right there on screen.”
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“Let me tell you. Yeah, I can ride a horse,” Ford answered, “if they let me.” “Thank you for — I didn’t mean to be cruel. No. I forgot everything up to ride a horse,” the star admitted. “Well, she also asked how you stay in shape, but Mads [Mikkelsen] kind of answered that with his Olympian story,” said the movie’s director James Mangold. “Which is bull—,” Ford jokingly interjected. He continued, “You’re very kind…but look, I’ve been blessed with this body.” He added, “Thanks for noticing.”
Speaking of Indiana Jones and horses, Ford definitely knows how to ride a stallion. In an interview with Esquire published in May, the star recounted a time on the Dial of Destiny set in which he intentionally did not accept the assistance of a gaggle of stuntmen who attempted to assist him off a horse after he finished filming a scene involving horseback riding.”I thought, What the f—? Like I was being attacked by gropers,” Ford told the outlet, adding that when he glanced down, “there’s three stunt guys there making sure I didn’t fall off the stirrup.”
Moreover, Ford said he told the stuntmen to “leave me the f— alone.” “I’m an old man getting off a horse and I want it to look like that!” he added. With his 81st birthday approaching this July, Ford said he set out to make this final Indiana Jones as ambitious as possible. “And I don’t mean that we didn’t make ambitious movies before,” he said. “They were ambitious in many different ways. But not necessarily as ambitious with the character as I wanted the last one to be.”
