We're Getting a De-Aged Harrison Ford in the New "Indiana Jones"

Harrison Ford has aged remarkably well. Harrison Ford will also turn 81 this summer. Aging is a process that affects people’s appearances in different ways; compare Ford to, say, Martin Scorsese and Ian McShane, both of whom were also born in 1942. But that doesn’t mean that being an actor of a certain age means that you need to play characters of the same age. And while actors have traditionally been aged up on screen, we’re reaching a point where a growing number of actors have played their younger selves on film.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has made plentiful use of de-aging technology, with the likes of Michael Douglas and Robert Downey, Jr. employing it on screen. The Irishman might be the good standard for this, allowing Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino to play the same roles over the course of decades. And now, Ford’s set to join that club in a way that falls somewhere between the action-adventure scope of the former and the extended screen time of the latter.

As Engadget reports, the forthcoming film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny will feature an extended sequence set in 1944. (For reference, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was set in 1938; Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was set in 1957.) For 25 minutes of screen time, Ford isn’t just playing Indiana Jones — he’s playing a younger version of the character than he’s played since 1989.

Or, to put it another way, Ford played a circa-1950 Jones in 1993’s Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues; thirty years later, he’s playing a younger version of Indy than that.

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Lucasfilm did have one asset that made the de-aging process significantly easier — plenty of footage of the younger Ford from the earlier films. In an interview with Empire, Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy said that the goal was for viewers to think that the 1944 scenes were “a thing they shot 40 years ago.” We’ll know in about two months — Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is scheduled for release on June 30, 2023.