Ford is stepping into a role left vacant by the death of William Hurt, who played Ross in five MCU films before he passed in 2022. In MCU continuity, though, Ross has won the White House by unseating the alien-hating President Ritson, played by Dermot Mulroney in TV’s Secret Invasion. Hurt’s Ross had a mustache; in the trailer there’s a winking reference to Ross having shaved in order to win the election.
So there’s an in-story explanation, but the mustache thing also feels like Ford winking at us from inside the noisy context of this movie. It’s like George Lazenby, briefly Sean Connery’s successor as James Bond, quipping “This never happened to the other fellow” in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It’s Ford tapping on the fourth wall to say Look, we all know I’m Harrison Ford, and I’m here because my eight planes run on gas that isn’t going to pay for itself.
One rule I try to live by in life is Don’t act like you’re too cool to be there if you’re there. This does not apply to people who are Harrison Ford. He is always going to be a little too cool to be there, by virtue of being Harrison Ford. Coming the man who once busted George Lucas’ balls on set by saying, to Lucas, regarding Lucas’ dialogue, “You can type this shit, George, but you sure can’t say it,” anything else would be a disappointment.
A while back, after Ford was photographed on the set of Brave New World wearing a pair of ripped, seemingly Hulked-out-of pants, he was asked during an Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny interview if we’d be seeing the Red Hulk in the Cap film. Ford’s perfectly Fordian response was “What, uh—what is a Red Hulk?” In the wake of the trailer and the simultaneous reveal of a poster featuring a Red Hulk hand crushing Cap’s shield, everyone has decided this answer was Ford being coy. But honestly, I like to believe Ford did not and maybe still does not know what a Red Hulk is, and maybe does not care—that he showed up to work, put on the ripped pants that were handed to him, shot his scenes, and clocked out, and whatever the CGI people did after that is none of his business.
Even if he did know, and was winking at the open-secret Red Hulkness of it all—and the rest of the clip, where he jokingly asks Waller-Bridge if she knew, makes it seem like he almost certainly did and was— it’s still a perfect Harrison Ford answer. One of the funniest/saddest things about the superhero-movie boom is the spectacle of gifted (or even kinda-good) actors having to sit in a press-junket chair and pretend, for fear of being wished into the cornfield along with their project, that they’ve always dreamed of playing Laser-Hand Man in a movie, that they in no way take lightly the legacy of Laser-Hand Man, that they want to do justice to this complicated character and the lasers he can shoot from his hands, that they showed up to work every day determined to give the fans of Laser-Hand Man the Laser-Hand Man movie that they deserve, and that all of this is in no way ridiculous or humiliating.
