Harrison Ford Explains Why He Has No Plans To Retire From Acting

Actor Harrison Ford is simply not ready to retire from Hollywood.

When asked if he has considered retiring, Ford, 80, told presenter, Chris Wallace, “I don’t do well when I don’t have work,” during an appearance on ‘Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?’, as reported by People. “I love to work. I love to feel useful. It’s my jones,” Ford, who turns 81 next month, said during the interview. “I want to be helpful.”

“It is the people that you get to work with,” he continued when Wallace asked what aspects of making movies he loves. “The intensity and the intimacy of collaboration. It’s the combined ambition somehow forged from words on a page. I don’t plan what I want to do in a scene, and I don’t feel obliged to do anything. But I am, I guess, naturally affected by the things that I work on.”

As per People, Wallace questioned Ford on what he meant when he said he wanted the upcoming film to be “ambitious” in his final turn as Indiana Jones. The actor stated that he intended the picture to “confront the question of age directly, not to hide my age, but to use it in the telling of the story.”

“I feel very strongly that it does [pull it off],” he added, before noting: “It’s time for me to grow up,” as he moves on from the longtime action-adventure franchise. “Six years ago, I thought maybe we ought to take a shot at making another one. And I wanted it to be about age because I think that rounds out the story that we’ve told and we’ve brought it to the right place,” he said, opining that 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull did not end with “a real strong feeling of the conclusion or the closure that I always hoped for.”

“Speaking to this issue of age, not making jokes about it, but making it a real thing,” Ford added of his desire for the new film.

When Ford recently spoke with People about the new Captain America picture, he stated he hasn’t lost his enthusiasm for the industry. “I probably enjoy making movies more now than I ever did,” he said. “I don’t want to be young again. I was young, and now I enjoy being old.”

Ford, who told People he finds “a certain ease” in aging, appears to remain humbled by his own success almost 50 years since he first collaborated with Indiana Jones and Star Wars creator George Lucas on 1973’s American Graffiti.

“No one ever believes this, but I never wanted to be rich and famous,” he said recently. “I just wanted to be an actor.”