By Erin Free
“Han Solo is the great rapscallion of the universe,” actor Harrison Ford once said of his greatest screen creation, proving that nobody knows a character quite like the performer who plays him. With his much loved 1977 sci-fi adventure, Star Wars (or Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, as it is now officially known), writer/director George Lucas created not just a whole universe, but also a cast of utterly indelible characters. In intergalactic smuggler Han Solo, however, he created the ultimate screen rogue. Hesitant to get amongst the action, but absolutely lethal when he’s in the middle of it, Solo has a quip for every occasion; a mercenary’s approach to self-preservation (in the version of Star Wars that we fell in love with, Han Solo definitely shoots first); an engagingly self-centred swagger; and an apparently cold, distant heart (“I ain’t in this for your revolution,” he says. “I’m in it for the money”) that slowly thaws across Star Wars’ two sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and The Return Of The Jedi, and then ever further in Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens. An icon of rebellious cool to rival James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause and Marlon Brando in The Wild One, Han Solo is the sole nihilistic presence in Star Wars’ gallery of eternal idealists, and it instantly makes him the most interesting character of the lot.
George Lucas has stated that Han “started out as a monster or a strange alien character”, and the great irony of this is that he ultimately ended up being Star Wars’ most enjoyably flawed, resolutely human character. He also almost wasn’t played by Harrison Ford, with a number of other actors (including everyone from Christopher Walken and Al Pacino to Sylvester Stallone and Billy Dee Williams) impressively auditioning for the part. But when Ford – who had featured in George Lucas’ 1973 film, American Graffiti – was tapped by the director to feed lines to other actors auditioning for Star Wars, he soon proved to Lucas that he was the right man to play Han Solo. “He’s not a cardboard character to me at all,” Ford replied to criticisms in 1979. “He’s as real as anything else. I never thought of the character as having only two dimensions until the critics said so. And they’re wrong. The third dimension is me.”
The actor’s perfect comic timing, masculine screen presence, and world weary insouciance (which just could not be replicated or even hinted at in 2018’s profoundly ill-advised, franchise-hobbling prequel Solo: A Star Wars Story) made Han Solo utterly unforgettable, and though Ford has occasionally appeared indifferent toward the adulation that he has inspired, you can’t question his commitment to the Star Wars universe. “I understood the impact of those movies because I had young children who watched them religiously,” Ford once said. “I saw the films so often in my house that I ended up knowing all of the other actors’ lines.”
If you liked this story, click here for our in-depth look at the Sydney, Australia shoot of Star Wars: Episode II – Attack Of The Clones and Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge Of The Sith.
