Harrison Ford doesn’t do a whole lot of work these days, tending to pick his projects carefully, staying away from the genre that made him a household name. (Sometimes this works out, sometimes it doesn’t.)
But it looks like at least one more sci-fi franchise of the 80’s is interested in getting him to play a chiseled authority figure, namely: the production of Ender’s Game.
According the Variety, he’s on a list of actors being approached to play the role of Colonel Graff, the head of Battle School and the face of Earth’s militaristic and psychologically remorseless campaign of crafting child soldiers and strategists. In the book, Graff’s actions eventually reveal (spoiler paragraph follows)
that all of Battle School was pretty much stopped being about training children (and instead started being about enveloping Ender in a psychological kiln to strip away any mental weakness or apetite for failure while at the same time heightening the boy’s empathy for everyone around him) as soon as Ender arrived.
(end spoilers)
The part was apparently first offered to Viggo Mortensen, but now that negotiations with him have fallen through, the production is looking for other professional men of gravitas who might want to make a movie with them, and Ford is among them. Makes me wonder: if they’re looking for that level of talent to play Graff, who on earth are they going to get to play Mazer Rackham? (Not Woody Harrelson, he’s busy playing almost the same trope in The Hunger Games, thanks.) The things I hear out of the Ender’s Game production continue to reassure me that this will be an adaptation that has a chance to spread the real spirit of the books (independent of their author’s real life politics).
(via Digital Spy.)
