How Dial Of Destiny's Phoebe Waller-Bridge Scared Harrison Ford With His Own Face
Harrison Ford should not be an easy man to scare.
The star best known for his derring do as Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Jack Ryan, President James Marshall, and Sgt. Joe Gavilan has perhaps, throughout the course of his life, believed himself to be as invincible as those larger-than-life heroes he's portrayed. Aside from the myriad times he's injured himself performing his own stunts, the man has crashed a plane into a ditch and another one onto the green of a golf course. He's also had a plane blown off a runway, taxied across a runway in front of a landing plane, and put his aircraft down on a taxiway.
He also once saved a boy scout from certain death in the Wyoming wilderness, but that was while piloting his helicopter. He has yet to crash one of those.
In any event, Ford has cheated the Reaper so frequently and with such abandon that you'd figure a simple on-set prank couldn't possibly rattle him; however, on the set of "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," Phoebe Waller-Bridge proved otherwise.
The frightening of Mr. Ford
As you'll recall from "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" (or maybe not, since, judging from its shockingly soft box office, a whole bunch of folks skipped out on the adventuring archeologist's last ride), the film opens with a flashback to 1944, where Indy and his colleague Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) attempt to recover the Archimedes-built relic of the title. The sequence largely employs a mixture of CG de-aging technology, but for one motorcycle bit, the make-up department devised a young Ford mask for the stuntman to wear.
At some point, Waller-Bridge, who plays Helena Shaw, Basil's daughter and Indy's goddaughter, ran across the mask and decided to play a prank on her co-star. She donned the fabricated face, and crashed Ford's trailer while wearing it. How did this work out?
"It scared the crap out of him, actually," she told Parade. "Even though that actually is only represented by him blinking three times and saying, 'Get the hell out of my trailer.'"
Ford has a reputation for being a bit of a crank, especially if he's making a movie he knows isn't any good, so Waller-Bridge can thank director James Mangold for running an evidently harmonious set and crafting a movie worthy of its star's approval. But from here on out, every single time she boards a private plane, she better check the cockpit before takeoff. Because payback is a b****, especially when it's being dished out by a man who once parked an aircraft in a ditch.