Before the original Star Wars arrived in theaters and changed blockbuster cinema forever, many regarded George Lucas’s 1977 passion project as a huge commercial risk, and according to one of the film’s main stars, even the movie’s crew didn’t have a whole lot of faith in what they were making.
To promote the release of his new effort The Call of the Wild, Harrison Ford recently sat down with Buzzfeed to answer a few fan questions. Inevitably, more than one concerned Ford’s run in the Star Wars franchise, prompting the Han Solo actor to recall the “complete and utter disdain” felt by the “very experienced British crew” on the set of A New Hope.
According to Ford, the crew was understandably perplexed by the costumes and characters of Lucas’s first space adventure, all of which came across as more than a little silly:
“They couldn’t figure it out. Guy running around in a dog suit and princess and some guys in tight pants. They couldn’t figure out what we were doing, so they laughed at us constantly, thought we were ridiculous. And we were, but we made a movie that people really enjoyed seeing.”
Indeed, the movie that some had believed to be Lucas’s folly went on to become a pop culture sensation, and when you adjust for inflation, the original Star Wars remains one of the highest grossing films of all time.
That being said, few at the time could’ve predicted that Ford would go on to play Han Solo in an additional four movies across multiple decades, the latest being last year’s trilogy-closing Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Though the actor famously has little-to-no interest in the various trivia, fan debates and franchise mythology that’s accompanied the movies for all these years, it seems he’s still game to dust off his old role every once in a while, even after his character is supposed to be dead. Nonetheless, if you’d like to see Ford in something completely different, The Call of the Wild is now in cinemas.