Harrison Ford Is Still Full of Surprises

Harrison Ford is, by all accounts, busier than ever.

“I’m acting my ass off!” the Hollywood veteran told John Jurgenson of the Wall Street Journal, in a profile published Wednesday.

In two recent hit shows and a new Marvel movie, the 82-year-old actor has embraced parts that have surprised fans and critics.

But there’s one role he has kept consistently for more than three decades: as a member of the board of Conservation International, where he is now vice chair.

As Jurgenson writes in the Journal story, the actor “reacts — with a visible cringe — to anything that might come off as pretentious.” Unsurprisingly, Ford has brought that same ethos to Conservation International, where his painstaking work has largely been behind the scenes, such as his discussions with French President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 that led France to pledge $100 million to protect the Amazon.

That’s not to say there haven’t been highly visible moments, such as his acclaimed turn as the surly voice of The Ocean in the award-winning “Nature Is Speaking” series of short films. (More recently, in a nod to his longtime commitment to conservation, he had a species of snake named after him.)

His work to help protect nature and the climate took on a new meaning in a recent brush with a disaster that was fueled in part by climate change: His Los Angeles home is perilously close to an area that was destroyed in January by wildfires.

Jurgenson writes:

In January, when M. Sanjayan, chief executive of the nonprofit Conservation International, heard that Ford was among L.A.’s wildfire evacuees, he thought of a line the actor delivered at a 2019 United Nations summit amid massive fires in the Amazon rainforest. Comparing the global effects of environmental crisis to an up-close emergency, Ford said in the address, “When a room in your house is on fire you don’t say, ‘There’s a fire in a room in my house,’ you say, ‘My house is on fire.’ And we only have one house.”

“This thing has always been deeply personal for him,” Sanjayan said, noting that now, as an L.A. resident swept up in a natural disaster, “he walks in a different set of shoes.”

Read the profile of Ford here.

Bruno Vander Velde is the managing director of storytelling at Conservation International. Want to read more stories like this? Sign up for email updates. Also, please consider supporting our critical work.