Actor Harrison Ford attended Ripon College in Wisconsin, but unlike many students, the star’s years as an undergrad were anything but carefree. The man who would travel the world as Indiana Jones “rarely ventured out,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter‘s Awards Chatter podcast. “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.”
On Apple TV series Shrinking, which had its third season finale this week, the 83-year-old plays gruff therapist Dr. Paul Rhoades, a role he’s expected to continue (in one form or another) in the show’s upcoming season four. Perhaps his experiences in the show helped him diagnose his younger self, who he says “was more than depressed. I think I was ill. I was socially ill, psychologically not well.”
“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. I would eat the pizza, throw the wrappers in the corner, go back to sleep,” Harrison Ford said of his early college years.
The turning point, as Ford explained when he accepted his life achievement trophy at the Actor Awards in March, was in his third year of school. “I felt isolated and alone, and then I found a company of people doing plays,” a visibly emotional Ford said. “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. “The work I do with other actors, it’s one of the great joys of my life.”
Ford elaborated on that thought in the interview published this week, saying “I never found a community at college until I accidentally—in an attempt to get my grade point average up—took a class called ‘drama’ without reading the full description of the class. It started out in the description talking about reading and analyzing plays, but I didn’t read the part where it said that you had to actually be in them as well, so that was a surprise. I’d never done anything like that.”
“And so I think I simply found my place amongst storytellers,” Ford continued. “It really changed my world, changed my life.”
So in a certain sense, Ford has come full-circle, from someone too depressed to leave his dorm room to someone who helps those with mental health issues. “Now I’m doing something I never thought that I would be doing: a television show now in its fourth season, a comedy, playing a shrink?” Ford asks, seemingly in disbelief at the turns life takes.
Saved from sadness by acting, Ford’s life is lighter and brighter these days. “I’m really quite goofy all on my own,” he told Vanity Fair in 2024. “But when I’m in the company of other people that I know to be goofy, there’s a certain relaxation of the rules. I like to have fun. I like to be around people that are having fun. I don’t like to get too serious.”
Originally published by Vanity Fair Italy
