My first crush was Peter Pan, which has provided my therapist with a lot of fodder. My second crush was Harrison Ford, who captured my heart so immensely when I first saw Star Wars that I dressed up as Han Solo for no fewer than three Halloweens. It is, therefore, a mild mindfuck that Ford is now into the “old man bonds with dog” phase of his career, having moved past the “killing off his beloved characters in misguided reboots” phase, but for some reason I’m still digging it?
Ford sat down with CBS News correspondent Lee Cowan to talk about the remake of The Call of the Wild, which comes out this week and is based on Jack London’s 1903 novel of the same name. Ford stars as an old hermit in the Yukon, and his costar is a CGI dog named Buck. During filming, Ford had to work with an acrobat in a motion capture suit, which was…something:
FORD: I mean, it’s a little strange. I’m rolling around on the floor with this guy and scratching his tummy.
COWAN: You physically were doing that with him? Because you had to, I guess, right?
FORD: There was money involved.
CBS helpfully provided a clip of Ford interacting with the fake dog, both in human and CGI form. It starts around 2:31:
I love CGI Dog Pal Ford almost as much as I loved Showed Up to the Set of Blade Runner: 2049 In Jeans & a T-Shirt & I’m Not Going to Change Out of Them Ford, to be honest. Someone please tell him to skip the new Indiana Jones movie, which starts filming this summer and can’t possibly be any good, and do Snow Dogs 2 instead.