Harrison Ford says his years as an undergraduate at Ripon College in Wisconsin were so isolating that he often turned away from the classroom door and went back to bed. The 83-year-old actor said this week that he was “more than depressed” in his younger years and would spend long stretches alone, ordering pizza, eating it in his room and returning to sleep.
“On the rare occasion I did go to the classroom, I would often touch the door on the outside of the building, and turn around and walk back,” Ford said of that period. He said he was “socially ill, psychologically not well,” and described a routine in which he would get up from a single bed, order food, and let the wrappers pile in a corner before sleeping again.
The turning point came in his third year of school, when Ford said he accidentally enrolled in a drama class while trying to raise his grade point average. He said he had not read the full course description and was surprised to learn he would have to act in plays, but that the mistake led him to a community he had not found anywhere else. “I felt isolated and alone, and then I found a company of people doing plays,” he said.
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Ford said the people he once saw as outsiders turned out to be his own. “People I once thought were misfits and geeks turned out to be my people. I found a calling, a life in storytelling, an identity in pretending to be other people,” he said. “And so I think I simply found my place amongst storytellers.” He said acting “really changed my world, changed my life.”
That history lands differently now because Ford is playing Dr. Paul Rhoades on Apple TV’s Shrinking, a series built around mental health and therapy. The show had its third season finale this week, and Ford said he expects to continue into the upcoming season four in one form or another. He also said in March, when he accepted his life achievement trophy at the Actor Awards, that the work he does with other actors is “one of the great joys of my life.”
The tension in Ford’s story is that the career now giving him so much satisfaction began with someone who did not feel at home anywhere and almost never went to class. He said he is now doing “a television show now in its fourth season, a comedy, playing a shrink,” and joked that he is “really quite goofy all on my own.” For Ford, the answer to what changed is plain: the accidental drama class at college did. It gave him a place, and he never stopped going back.
