About the Scar on Harrison Ford's Chin

When we talk about the physical appearance of movie stars, it's often within the context of what doesn't appear. Namely, discernible flaws. Scars, veins, cysts, enlarged pores, the pitted ghosts of teenage acne—the only place those have in Hollywood is on character actors.*

But Harrison Ford has a scar, a big one on his chin, and it's such a beloved feature of his face that it's been written into the scripts of two of his movies. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, it becomes part of our hero's origin story when River Phoenix, as a young Indy, accidentally strikes himself in the face with a bullwhip. In Working Girl, the scar becomes the subject of post-coital conversation when Melanie Griffith, as Tess McGill, asks Harrison, as Jack Trainer, where he got it. He tells her that someone pulled a knife in Detroit before sheepishly admitting that one night, he asked a girlfriend to pierce his ear and then promptly passed out and hit his chin on the toilet.

Ford freaks such as myself know that the scar traces its origin to 1964. That was the year that Harrison Ford got into a minor car accident on his way to Bullock's department store in Santa Ana, where he worked as a buyer for knickknacks and oil paintings; he was fumbling with his seatbelt and crashed into a telephone pole. A real "stars: they're just like us!" moment, aside from perhaps the bit about knickknacks and oil paintings.**

I first learned this story in either elementary or junior high school, when I read Harrison Ford: A Biography by the iconically named Minty Clinch.*** I loved the story because it made Harrison Ford more accessible to me. Onscreen, he piloted a space ship and killed Nazis. Offscreen, he was the kind of person who forgot to put on his seatbelt but was conscientious enough to try to correct his mistake, only to make a bigger one.

In retrospect, the scar also underscored what I found special about Harrison Ford's face, and who he is as an actor. Harrison Ford is an undeniably handsome man. But if you look at his face, you'll see that his nose is slightly crooked, and that half the time he smiles, he seems to be enduring a degree of psychic distress. His strain of handsomeness is typically categorized as "rugged," but I prefer to think of it as imperfect and earth-bound.

This is the same way I think of his acting. He's never been one of those actors who disappears into a role; you're always aware that you're watching Harrison Ford. No matter who he plays, he's gruff, deadpan, a little withholding, macho and awkward in equal measure. You will never, thank god, see him lose or gain 30 pounds for a role, or conduct interviews in a fake accent he just couldn't shake after filming wrapped. He's more like a very dependable neighborhood restaurant: consistent, no unwelcome surprises, service with a (slightly pained) smile.

The scar tells us all of this. Here is this imperfect man, this actor without enough vanity to fix his face, or pretend to be someone he is not capable of pretending to be. Here is someone who will give you what you came for. And in that way, the scar is flawless.

What I'm consuming this week:

Reading: A galley of Cynthia Buchanan's 1972 novel Maiden, to be reissued by Hagfish this October.

Watching: Straight Time, a mesmerizing 1978 crime drama that casts an oddly sexy Dustin Hoffman as a career criminal and Harry Dean Stanton and Gary Busey as his accomplices. 

Listening: Marc Maron's 2021 interview with the late, great Sam Neill, gone much too soon at the age of 78.

*There's an entire IMDb page dedicated to actors with visible scars. Among them is Sean Bean, who got his scar when none other than Harrison Ford accidentally kicked him in the face while filming Patriot Games.

**A fun thought exercise is to imagine Harrison Ford as a buyer for knickknacks and oil paintings, even for just a day.

***I may need to devote an entire newsletter to Minty Clinch.