It doesn’t take a close read of Alec Baldwin’s new, dishy memoir Nevertheless, to notice the thinly-veiled animosity he holds for for Harrison Ford, who replaced him as Jack Ryan following The Hunt For Red October. As Baldwin tells it, he had no idea that he was being ousted from the Tom Clancy franchise, and Ford was curtly unsympathetic to his situation. Ford had dropped out of a film with Hunt director John McTiernan in order to play the part that Baldwin had once had. “John told me he spoke with Ford and asked if he was aware that Paramount was in active negotiation with me,” Baldwin writes. “Ford’s reply, according to John, was ’Fuck him.’” (For what it’s worth, this is not the first time that Baldwin has shared this story, and studio exec David Kirkpatrick has disputed his account of how things went down.)
It would be one thing if the Ford anecdote ended there, but Baldwin goes on to dwell on the fact that Indiana Jones hasn’t won an Oscar and describe him in distinctly unflattering terms. Baldwin explains that he met Ford ”years later,” and notes: “I realized then that the movies really do enhance certain actors, making them seem like something they really aren’t at all. Ford, in person, is a little man, short, scrawny, and wiry, whose soft voice sounds as if it’s coming from behind a door.” It’s a brutal assessment, that pointedly undercuts the tough image on which Ford has built his career. The message here seems to be: Do not fuck with Alec Baldwin lest you want to be excoriated in print.