In the next few weeks, Harrison Ford will officially join the Marvel Cinematic Universe, starring in Captain America: Brave New World as both the president of the United States and Red Hulk. However, the film is shaping up to be a critical and commercial flop – maybe even the biggest Marvel flop yet – and so it makes sense that Ford would want to quickly move on to his next project.
And now we know what that project is. This week a number of videos appeared on the YouTube channel of the Scottish whisky brand Glenmorangie, taking the form of a semi-fictional six-part series about the adventures of Harrison Ford in Scotland. Joel Edgerton directed the adverts. They’re set in the Traitors castle. It’s all quite hard to comprehend.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that a Hollywood star has gone abroad to make money in adverts. Nicolas Cage went to Japan and made a series of incomprehensible pachinko commercials, while more recently Robert De Niro came to the UK to become the face of sliced bread. Perhaps the most similar to this are the series of blockbuster tourism commercials that Zac Efron and Jessica Alba made for Dubai, which took the form of compressed action movie trailers filmed across a number of famous local landmarks.
But even this doesn’t quite match up to the sheer weirdness of what Ford has done here. Anyone could just go to Scotland and sip some booze, but this is almost a soap opera. In episode one, Ford paces about his bedroom having seen a vision of Scotland while meditating, and demands to be taken to a castle. In the second he arrives in Scotland, visits the Glenmorangie distillery and immediately starts telling people that he won’t do adverts, until they give him a nice car, and then he changes his mind.
Episode three sees Ford visit his accommodation, which is very clearly the castle where they film The Traitors, and he goes to the Round Table room and breaks a suit of armour. Episode four he puts on a kilt. Episode five he goes back to the distillery and does a genuinely upsetting Scottish accent to a Scottish person. In episode six, he drinks some whisky and then throws the advert’s script in the fire.
And then that’s it. Maybe. It’s honestly hard to tell since, because the series doesn’t really have anything approaching an identifiable narrative, Ford throwing the script in the fire could be the end, but it could just as equally be another ambient punctuation point on a story that will play out for ever. There’s a compressed version of the series that plays out as a traditional 60-second advert. That has a shot of Ford on a glen in a kilt surrounded by bagpipers. Could this have been taken from a later episode? Is that going to end up being the story, of Harrison Ford becoming more and more cartoonishly Scottish until he ends up looking and acting like Russ Abbot from the 1980s?
I do sort of want Ford to keep making these adverts for ever, though. There’s something weirdly melancholy about them. They’re about an older man in a foreign country, a bit bemused and seemingly in the grip of an existential crisis. In that regard they’re a bit like Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip, only with fewer impressions. Who knows where it could go from here. Maybe he’ll find love, and the whole thing will become a kind of whisky-based Gold Blend campaign. Maybe he’ll stay in the castle so long that he’ll end up on the next series of The Traitors. Maybe he’ll hulk out. There’s really no telling.
It’s an interesting way for the latter stages of a career to play out. Harrison Ford is an icon, a man destined to go down as one of the all-time great film actors. And yet here he is, 82 years old and farting around on YouTube for a relatively small audience, seemingly just to entertain himself.
It reminds me a little of David Lynch who, after spending years at the forefront of arthouse cinema, spent his latter years happily messing about on the internet. The last piece of work Lynch ever produced is a video on his channel, where he took an old film and did a funny voiceover about butts on top of it. He was happy doing it, so we should be happy it exists. Same goes for Harrison Ford. Forget the MCU, if he wants to spend the rest of his life dithering about in Scotland, none of us should stop him.
