“It doesn’t get any bigger or better than our first guest,” Jimmy Fallon said Tuesday night before introducing Harrison Ford, the “Academy Award-nominated” actor who is reprising his role as Han Solo in this month’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
From the moment he stepped out onto the stage, Ford was his typical surly self, though not as bizarrely out of it as he has been on Conan O’Brien’s show. “So, you keep saying that I’m Academy Award-nominated,” Ford said at the top of the interview. “Don’t you get it? I didn’t win.” And he wasn’t buying Fallon’s assertion that “nobody hears” the word “nominated” in that descriptor.
Over the course of the longer than average late night interview, the two men discussed that time Ford pierced Fallon’s ear on national television (for the record, “it closed up”), drank cocktails that were supposed to look like lightsabers (in Ford’s words, “they look like two glasses with colored blocks of ice in them”) and created a running joke in which they did spit takes every time the name J.J. Abrams came up.
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But the highlight came when Fallon pulled out a vintage Han Solo action figure and asked Ford to use it to demonstrate how he injured his leg during the filming of the latest movie. When Fallon mentioned that Abrams got hurt as well trying to help him, Ford muttered, “Oh, poor guy, what a pity.”
Contrary to Fallon’s assumption that a piece of the set fell on the actor’s leg, Ford shielded his mouth before exclaiming, “They closed the fucking door on me!” He added, “J.J. did it, as far as I know.” Then, he tore off the Han Solo figure’s foot, and pants, for good measure, to show Fallon just how much it hurt.
“Why did I come here?” Ford wondered aloud before the host showed the only clip released so far of Han Solo in the new film from the official trailer, a moment he said gave him “chills.”
“Did you get emotional when you put the wardrobe on?” Fallon wanted to know before letting Ford off the hook.
“No, I got paid,” Ford answered.
