Harrison Ford has shared the screen with a litany of memorable actors — but there’s a surprising reason why his wife, Calista Flockhart, has yet to make the list.
“That’s just the circumstantial reality where we haven’t been offered something where we’d work together,” Ford, 82, exclusively told Us Weekly at PaleyLive’s An Evening of Shrinking program at WGA Theater.
Ford noted that he would “love to work” with Flockhart, 60, if an opportunity ever came up. Right now, though, the actor has enjoyed getting to play Dr. Paul Rhoades on Apple TV+’s hit show Shrinking alongside Jason Segel, Jessica Williams, Michael Urie, Christa Miller and Ted McGinley.
“This is the best job I’ve ever had,” he admitted to Us. “I live half an hour away. I go home and I sleep in my own bed. I’m in the same town as my wife and children and I’m doing really smart, intelligent storytelling with incredibly talented people.”
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Shrinking, which premiered in 2023, stars Segel as a grieving therapist who decides to become drastically more involved in his patients’ lives as he mourns the death of his wife and learns to parent as a single father. Ford’s character, meanwhile, is a senior therapist at the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Center who has Parkinson’s disease.
“That’s the joy of this job for me. You can allow your emotions to drive the bus, but you have to guide it,” Ford noted about his approach to playing Paul. “You have to tell it where it’s going and make sure the people that need to get off, get off of it at the right time.”
Ford called Shrinking an “emotional exercise” for him, adding, “That’s what I think we’re offering an audience. We’re offering them [an] emotional exercise; a chance to practice empathy and understanding [for] people that are unlike you — they’re not in your group chat — [and] experience what it’s like to learn from their experiences as well.”
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While Ford’s performance has pulled at Us‘ heartstrings, he prefers not to overthink the process.
“I don’t get into character. It’s not a process. It’s not a trick,” he told Us. “I don’t know when I’m going into a scene whether I’m going to laugh or cry. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Off screen, Ford prioritizes spending time with his loved ones. He shares sons Ben, 58, and William, 55, with ex-wife Mary Marquardt, to whom he was married from 1964 to 1979. Ford was also married to the now-late Melissa Mathison from 1983 to 2004 and they welcomed daughter son Malcolm, now 37, and daughter Georgia, now 34, before Mathison’s death from neuroendocrine cancer in 2015.
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Ford has since found love with Flockhart. The couple originally met at the 2002 Golden Globes, but didn’t start dating until later and tied the knot in 2010. Ford went on to adopt Flockhart’s son Liam, now 23.
“We’ve had our ups, we’ve had downs like everybody else — mostly ups, which is good — and we just stay together,” Flockhart told The New York Times in January of her relationship with her husband. “He’s the person that I want to call when something happens. That knee-jerk thing where I have to call Harrison.”
Shrinking is streaming on Apple TV+.
With reporting by Lanae Brody
