Solo Mission

Long before he met Jedi wannabe (and future brotherin-law) Luke Skywalker, the space pirate was hanging out with a different crew. Lo and behold, get ready for the untold early story of galactic scoundrel Han Solo.

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There’s an interesting anecdote of how Harrison Ford got to play Han Solo, the iconic galactic smuggler-turned-debonair freedom fighter in the Star Wars movies: He got the job serendipitously.

You see, the 1970s hadn’t been really kind to Ford’s acting career: He hadn’t landed a role for ages. So he fell back on his other day job as a carpenter. Ford first met George Lucas when the latter hired him to work on his cabinets. After that initial encounter, Lucas gave Ford a small part — a drag racer named Bob Falfa — in his coming-of-age dramedy American Graffiti, which also starred one Ron Howard (more about him in a bit).

Ford would cross paths with Lucas again in 1976 at the office of Francis Ford Coppola, where Ford was finishing up some carpentry work while Lucas was busy auditioning actors for a space opera called Star Wars. A casting agent later asked Ford to help Lucas with the auditions by reading with the actors.

“I read with more than 100 actors,” Ford said in a 2015 Rolling Stone interview. “The story that I know is that there were two threesomes that they narrowed it down to, and I was in one of them. I had no idea that that was a potential situation. They asked me if I wanted to do it, and I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ ”

While Lucas initially resisted the idea of casting Ford as Solo (he already had Christopher Walken for the part), he eventually relented when Ford dropped by the studio to fix a door. (Carpentry again.) No fuss. No fanfare. And the rest is pop culture history.