Home \ Signature Roles \ Apocalypse Now (1979) — Harrison Ford
HARRISON FORD · 1979 · SIGNATURE ROLES
Colonel Lucas is a small role in a vast film, and Harrison Ford plays it with characteristic economy.
Colonel Lucas is a small role in a vast film, and Harrison Ford plays it with characteristic economy. In Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic, Lucas is the intelligence officer who briefs Captain Willard on his mission — to travel upriver and terminate the renegade Colonel Kurtz — and who represents, in a few crisp scenes, the bureaucracy that sends men to do unthinkable things and then denies it ordered them.
Ford had worked with Coppola before, as a carpenter on his office, and the director cast him partly as a thank-you and partly because Ford’s plainspoken authority was exactly what the role needed. In a film of hallucinatory excess, Lucas is a moment of cold, official calm — and Ford plays him as a man who knows the mission is madness and delivers it anyway.
