Hollywood legend Harrison Ford has fought off Nazis, battled rogue replicants, and outrun giant boulders, but in a candid new interview, he revealed one of his toughest battles was with severe depression.
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On a recent episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s “Awards Chatter” podcast, the 83-year-old actor recalled that he would “rarely venture out” of his single room at Ripon College in Wisconsin.
“I would get up out of my single bed, go to a phone, order a pizza, go back and lay down in bed until the pizza came,” the Indiana Jones icon said.
“I would eat the pizza, throw the wrappers in the corner, go back to sleep,” Ford shared. He added that on the “rare” occasions he did try to attend class, he would simply “touch the door on the outside of the building, and turn around and walk back.”
“I was more than depressed; I think I was ill,” Ford recalled. “I was socially ill, psychologically not well.”
Ford said he struggled to find a sense of belonging at the university until a drama class, taken to improve his grades, changed everything. He didn’t realize the class involved acting in plays, not just reading and analyzing them, which gave him his first experience as a performer.
“And I was surprised that the people that I had considered to be fellow geeks and misfits were, in fact, some of the most interesting people I knew,” the Shrinking actor explained.
“They were doing something that I hadn’t really understood, and they were telling stories about life and life, and those stories about life were informative, and some of them were exceptional in their capacity to understand human behavior,” Ford added.
Harrison Ford Taking Drama to Improve His GPA Changed His Life Forever
Ford said the drama class finally gave him a sense of belonging.
“I think I simply found my place amongst storytellers,” he shared. “It was the story that gave me a focus and an opportunity to think about something and be part of it with a group of people.”
“It really changed my world, changed my life,” Ford added on the podcast.
However, depression wasn’t the only obstacle Ford faced in college. Despite studying philosophy, he was expelled just four days before graduation for plagiarism.
“I had not been strict enough in controlling whose words I was using in my senior thesis,” he confessed. “And I was accused of and admitted that there was plagiarism.”
During the podcast, Ford credited his early projects alongside director George Lucas, such as American Graffiti and the original Star Wars, with launching his successful career.
“I got to play leading parts because the films I was in had success, and that success carried me along,” Ford recalled.
“And it has carried me along, but a big part of that success is being in the right place at the right time, luck, persistence,” the beloved actor added.