Clint Eastwood & More Acting Legends Were Considered For A Classic Harrison Ford Sci-Fi Movie

Harrison Ford has always had issues with "Blade Runner," and time hasn't made him any fonder of the film. But it should have, because despite it being a box office flop upon its 1982 release, it has since become accepted as one of the most important and influential sci-fi movies ever made. Of course, Ford has never let popularity convince him of anything (he never really cared about "Star Wars" despite its overwhelming success), but you'd think he'd be glad that his movie is thought of so highly — especially since he was just one of many stars who could have fronted the film.

Hampton Fancher, who co-wrote the "Blade Runner" script with David Peoples, certainly had a different vision in mind when he first set about bringing the movie to life. He'd actually performed on-screen during the 1960s while under contract with Warner Bros. but had left acting behind in the mid-'70s and optioned the rights to Philip K. Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" as a way of kicking off his writing career. 

In the end, the movie that emerged from Fancher's typewriter bore little resemblance to Dick's original story, but then the film itself also looked a lot different compared with how the screenwriter originally envisioned it. Ford's casting was just one example. When Fancher initially wrote the script, he did so with Robert Mitchum in mind, an actor who'd broken through all the way back in the '40s and made a name for himself in film noir classics like "Out of the Past." He was hardly the guy from "Raiders of the Lost Ark," but it seems Fancher and the film's producers weren't actually all that picky about who they got to play replicant hunter Rick Deckard. A bewildering array of acting legends, big-name stars, and not-so-big-name stars were considered and pursued for the role before Ford was cast.

In Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic, Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard is an ex-specialist police officer known as a Blade Runner — a type of bounty hunter whose sole job is to hunt down and "retire" synthetic humans called replicants. In a dystopian future version of Los Angeles, Deckard is brought out of retirement to track a group of four replicants led by Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty. The group have returned to Earth despite replicants being outlawed on the human home-world, and it's Deckard's job to retire every one of these rogue artificial humanoids. But while that's a great setup for an unforgettable sci-fi actioner, it's also the basis for some profound reflection on the nature of what it means to be human and the loneliness that accompanies the kind of technocratic industrial future envisioned in the film.

"Blade Runner" was also a surprisingly personal project for Ridley Scott, who had lost his brother Frank prior to working on what was his third feature. Some of the film's oppressively somber tone undoubtedly comes from the director's personal experience, and that's a big part of what makes the movie so hauntingly memorable. But there's no doubt Harrison Ford was also a big part of the film's appeal, having starred in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" the year prior to its release. Aside from burgeoning star-power, though, Ford brought the perfect mix of hard-boiled detective gruffness and sensitivity to the role of Deckard, whose true identity as either human or replicant remains the big unanswered question at the heart of "Blade Runner."

Without Ford, it's hard to imagine the film would have become the celebrated work that it is today. But it seems Hampton Fancher and the producers had many other names in mind before they settled on Indiana Jones himself. In Time's 30th anniversary retrospective of the film, Fancher is not only said to have written the Deckard character with Robert Mitchum in mind, but the producers actually considered every big-name star of the era you could imagine, from Sean Connery and Jack Nicholson to Paul Newman and even Clint Eastwood. At the time "Blade Runner" debuted, Eastwood had just starred in futuristic thriller "Firefox," which came out a week before Scott's film and was a modest success. Conversely, "Blade Runner" became one of the biggest sci-fi movie flops of all time. As such, Eastwood likely thought he'd fronted the right movie at the time, but "Firefox" has hardly managed to attain the "classic" status that "Blade Runner" has in the years since.

Other names reportedly on the list for Deckard included Peter Falk, Al Pacino, Nick Nolte, and even Burt Reynolds, who would team up with Eastwood two years later for a gangster movie flop he always regretted.

Reading through the list of names being pursued by the "Blade Runner" producers, you'd be forgiven for getting the impression that nobody really had a clear vision of Rick Deckard. Apparently, months were wasted trying to get Dustin Hoffman to commit, but instead, the actor's only movie from 1982 was satirical rom-com "Tootsie," which made a heck of a lot more money than "Blade Runner" and also garnered a lot more critical praise. Who do you go after if you can't get Dustin Hoffman? Arnold Schwarzenegger, apparently, who had yet to make his breakthrough in "Conan the Barbarian," which ultimately debuted in theaters the month before "Blade Runner" and earned the Austrian Oak worldwide recognition. Had he fronted Ridley Scott's dreary dystopian cyberpunk nightmare, however, perhaps things would have worked out very differently for Schwarzenegger.

Ultimately, it seems Harrison Ford landed the lead role due to "Raiders of the Lost Ark," which at the time Ridley Scott and producer Michael Deeley were casting their movie, was in production. After the pair saw rushes from Steven Spielberg's classic action adventure outing, they were convinced Ford was the best man for Rick Deckard. Deeley told Los Angeles Magazine back in 2007 that Spielberg himself screened early "Raiders" footage for him and Scott, and they were immediately sold. "We thought, 'This guy is a leading man,'" he said. "We had our star." Despite playing Han Solo in "Star Wars," apparently Ford wasn't a household name around the world quite yet. As Scott told GQ, "I remember my financiers saying, 'Who the f*** is Harrison Ford?' I said, 'You're gonna find out.' So [he] became my leading man." 

It's a good thing he did, too. While "Blade Runner" wouldn't initially prove all that successful, Rick Deckard remains one of Ford's best roles ... though, there's surely a part of us all that would want to see what "Blade Runner" would have looked like had it starred Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarzenegger.