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It is one of Ford's best roles yet, allowing him greater scope than Han Solo in Star Wars or Indiana Jones or the hot rodder he portrayed in American Grafitti or the chilling Army officer in Apocalypse Now. But he is right when he says that John Book is not a stretch from his other characters: it is an extension. Some people, he complains, say, " 'Well, Witness is really acting. It's great you're getting a chance to play a real person.' " In fact, he says, with some asperity, "my ambition was to play real people in Star Wars and Raiders. Doing this movie didn't feel any different to me from doing any other movie. The process is the same. It was regular acting." Unlike some more timid actors, Ford is willing to take chances and experiment with a character. "He is constantly looking for the authentic moment," says Irvin Kershner, director of The Empire Strikes Back. "You can try anything out on him."
Some actors--Robert De Niro, for example--pour themselves into a character and are all but unrecognizable from one film to another. Others, usually actors from the past like Gary Cooper or Cary Grant, pour the role into themselves. Grant could be a stumble-footed comic in pictures like Bringing Up Baby and Arsenic and Old Lace or an urbane romantic hero in To Catch a Thief or North by Northwest, but no one would ever have mistaken him for anyone but Cary Grant.
The same can be said about Ford. Han Solo, that interstellar swashbuckler, is brash and egotistical; Indiana Jones, with his whip and wide-brimmed hat, is a dashing romantic; John Book is, in the end, sensitive and compassionate. All three characters are believably different, but all three are also brothers. All share that quarter-inch, side-of-the-mouth smile that follows a sardonic one-liner, and all are based on the rock-hard actor underneath. "The roles get lost in Harrison," says Carrie Fisher, the Princess Leia of the Star Wars series. "I don't think that there's a lot that is dissimilar between the character and the person. It's no accident that he plays a lot of heroes. He plays somebody you can rely on, who will take care of whatever it is, from a kid's hurt finger to a murder to saving the galaxy. He has that quality."
It is hard to imagine Ford's being convincing as a creep or a cretin or even an ordinary villain, and his career has followed the dutiful, almost square path one would expect from the characters he projects. When he saw that he was not receiving the kinds of parts he wanted back in the '60s, he did what the forthright, somewhat self-righteous John Book would have done. Rather than fritter away his talent as a bit actor on TV car-chase shows, he all but dropped out for seven years, turning down 90% of the jobs he was offered. With books borrowed from the public library, he learned how to put two pieces of wood together in a presentable fashion and became a carpenter to the stars, affording his wife and two sons a decent if modest living.