Harrison Ford has never thought of himself as a hero.
Not even when he fought the Nazis as Indiana Jones or captained his pirate spaceship through enemy territory as Han Solo.
”You cannot, as an actor, set out to play a hero,” he says. ”You have to play a person, a human being. And whatever the script requires you to do, you do that, and let the reference of heroism come from somebody else.”
Although he refuses the laurel, that reference sits well on Ford, who`d rather be at home in Wyoming with his family than talking about himself in a frenzy of Hollywood publicity.
There are two important aspects in his life: work and family.
”One pays for the other,” he says. ”I don`t like to go to work unless I`ll be able to work hard enough to be able to take some time off.”
By design Ford works only once a year.
”When I go out of the barn,” he says, ”I go out for five months to do the biggest movie I can, to make the biggest pile I can-to be frank-so I can go back and do the other thing I enjoy doing as well.”
His big movie this year, ”Patriot Games,” based on the Tom Clancy novel, recently opened. It may be the first of three, says Ford, who has agreed to star in the sequels if he approves of the scripts and directors.
In ”Patriot Games,” Ford plays former CIA agent Jack Ryan, now a lecturer in naval history, who finds himself in a perilous situation.
”He behaves in a way which you may nominate as heroic. I see him as a guy trying to save his butt and to save his family,” Ford says.
If Ford underestimates his film characters, he also underestimates himself. He`s not a spiritual man, he says, though there is a certain unpretentious veracity about him, in his soft-spoken voice, the way his eyes make contact after a sideways glance.
”I believe in fairness and morality and responsibility. But I don`t have an absolute spiritual reference,” he says. ”I believe it`s important to do good work and to be nice to people. What I believe in is that we are morally responsible.”
Ford, 49, remembers the first time he was on stage at Ripon College in Wisconsin.
”My first reaction was that this was the first thing that had ever scared me that badly. So all my first efforts were overcoming the fear that it generated. Once I got past that part of it, I was intrigued by the storytelling aspect of it. And also the freedom that it brought to me.
”In the guise of another personality, I was able to explore things in myself that I wasn`t able to deal with in real life.”
Ford started as a contract player nabbing small roles in television Westerns. In the early `70s he began working as a carpenter, though he never really quit acting, he says.
”Until I had an alternate income, I had to take every acting job that came along and wasn`t able to make creative choices,” he says.
Once he had another job to fall back on, Ford began to pick and choose, calculating the advantage of each opportunity.
Ford is married to screenwriter Melissa Mathison (”E.T.”). They are the parents of a boy and a girl. Ford has two sons by a previous marriage.
He has learned much since he felt his stomach churn that first time on stage.
”The one thing my research has led me to understand-whether I was researching doctors or lawyers or policemen or anything else-is that, what you finally discover, is that they are just like we are, only they do a different job.
”What helps you as an actor is not what you have as differences between you, but your common humanity.”
