‘Who the F*** Is Harrison Ford?’ Ridley Scott Says ‘Blade Runner’ Financiers Balked at Casting

Ridley Scott originally had to defend his choice of leading man in the 1982 sci-fi hit Blade Runner, the celebrated director revealed this week.

“Harrison Ford was not a star yet,” Scott said in a video interview with the magazine GQ.

The actor had played a major supporting role in Star Wars and was in the middle of filming Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he’d never helmed a box office hit.

“I remember my financiers saying, ‘Who the f--- is Harrison Ford?’ I said, ‘You’re going to find out,’” Scott recalled.

Blade Runner follows a burnt-out cop named Rick Deckard (played by Ford) in a dystopian future Los Angeles set in 2019. He agrees to hunt down a group of fugitive replicants—synthetic humans that have been bio-engineered by a powerful corporation to work on space colonies.

But creative differences quickly arose between the film’s director and its star, according to a 2017 retrospective of the film in Vanity Fair magazine. Ford hated the film’s voiceover narration—which he was contractually obligated to record—and he and Scott disagreed about whether his character was a human or an unknowing replicant.

Reviews were mixed, and then the real box office death knell arrived: Blade Runner had the great misfortune of being released two weeks after Steven Spielberg’s E.T.

Reagan-era audiences loved E.T.’s optimistic message about love and the indomitability of the human spirit. They were far less interested in Blade Runner’s tech-skeptical urban doomscape, according to Vanity Fair.

But thanks to midnight screenings and the rise of VHS, the film began to develop cult status. Christopher Nolan watched a pirated copy when he was at boarding school, and a then-14-year-old Denis Villeneuve saw the film dubbed into French in a small town in Quebec.

New director’s cuts were released in 1992 and 2007, “with fans dissecting each version with the zeal of Talmudic scholars,” Vanity Fair reported. Today, it’s considered one of Hollywood’s greatest science fiction films.

A sequel, Blade Runner 2049, was released in 2017 starring Ford, Ryan Gosling and Ana de Armas.