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Courtesy: Parade Magazine

In exclusive interview with Parade, the leading man of five Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones franchise and dozens of other hit flicks talks about how he overcame a slow career start to become one of Hollywood’s most durable stars.

Snakes! Working at a Wisconsin summer camp in his youth, he was tasked with building a terrarium—and finding critters to stock it. So he rounded up the required creepy-crawlers, splashers and hopping things. “It served me well,” he says, “when I came to be Indiana Jones and had not developed a fear of snakes.”   

He Came, He Saw(ed). In Hollywood, he became frustrated early on with bit parts, so he learned carpentry to supplement his income, remodeling houses and building cabinets and furniture. “Everything I built is still standing today,” he says proudly. As his hammer-and-nail business grew, so did his acting résumé—but he vowed to never take another acting job unless the next role was better than the one before. “The last time I packed up my tools to go do a movie, I had no idea I wouldn’t unpack them again,” he says. “And that was [Han Solo in] Star Wars.”

Going ‘Wild.’ In The Call of the Wild (in theaters now), the latest big-screen adaptation of the classic adventure novel by Jack London, he plays John Thornton, a prospector in the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s who befriends a formerly abused dog, Buck. Together in untamed Alaska, Jack and Buck find how much they both needed “to slough off [their] domestic experience and feel a part of nature,” says Ford, who adds that the movie’s bigger theme is that “nature doesn’t need people; people need nature.”   

That secret to his 10-year-marriage to actress Calista Flockhart? “Don’t talk. Nod your head.”

The return of Indy. Ford won’t reveal any details of the 2021 movie with director Steven Spielberg, except to say he’s looking forward to his standard Indy tasks: running, jumping, falling and rolling around. “They’re hard,” he says of the Indiana Jones movies, “but they’re fun.”

For more about Harrison Ford, including what his life is like at home in Wyoming with wife Calista Flockhart, see Sunday’s Parade or go to Parade.com.