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Mon 11 May 2026 19:45, UK
Some actors just aren’t cut out for turning to the dark side and convincing audiences that they have enough bad bones in their body to make you hate them, and Harrison Ford is one of them.
Whether it’s due to their chops not stretching far enough to make it convincing, an onscreen persona so entrenched in heroism that it’s impossible to buy into, or a career-long aversion to breaking bad that makes it jarring more than anything else when it does happen, typecasting can work both ways.
Tom Hanks veered into moustache-twirling territory in The Circle, and it was crap. Clint Eastwood never even bothered because he was smart enough to realise that he either couldn’t pull it off or nobody wanted to see it, but on the other hand, Collateral showed that Tom Cruise should have really done it more than once by now.
As for Ford, he was almost 35 years and 35 films deep into his career before he finally set foot on the dark side, and Robert Zemeckis’ What Lies Beneath remains an anomaly as the only full-fledged villainous character he’s ever played. A decade beforehand, though, he was desperate to play against type.
Having become so intrinsically associated with good guys and loveable rogues, with Han Solo and Indiana Jones at the forefront, the star was on the hunt for a juicy part that would completely subvert his image. He found one, but it already belonged to someone else, and he couldn’t convince them to give it up.
In 1997, years before What Lies Beneath, Ford was asked if he’d even want to play a villain. As it turned out, he’d already had that flirtation, and despite fighting his corner and stating his case to one of the greatest directors in cinema, one of the greatest actors in cinema refused to budge, so he ruled himself out of the picture entirely.
“The only time it came up was when Martin Scorsese was doing Cape Fear,” he elaborated. “He asked Bob De Niro to ask me to play the lawyer, and I told De Niro that the only way I would be interested in doing that film would be if he played the lawyer and I played his role. Of course, he didn’t want to give up his part.”
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
You can easily imagine Ford playing Nick Nolte’s Samuel Bowden, because it’s a role not unlike one that he’d played a handful of times before. However, Ford as Max Cady, the tattooed, obsessive, deranged, and dangerous convicted criminal who seeks to make up for lost time by making revenge his first port of call after 14 years behind bars? Not so much.
That’s exactly what makes it such an intoxicating what-if, though. De Niro may have earned a deserved ‘Best Actor’ nomination at the Academy Awards, but Cape Fear would have been a completely different movie had Ford been the antagonist. Maybe not a better one, necessarily, but seeing the clean-cut actor plumbing those depths would have been a sight to behold either way.
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