He does whatever roles call for

Los Angeles // Everyone wants to be Cary Grant," an actor named Cary Grant once said. "Even I want to be Cary Grant."

Does anyone want to be Harrison Ford? You'd think. The 36 movies he's made since 1967 have grossed more than $3 billion. He's starred in some of the most popular films of all time (Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark), received an Academy Award nomination (Witness) and several for Golden Globes (Sabrina, The Fugitive, The Mosquito Coast). He was named Box Office Star of the Century by America movie theater owners at the 1994 Sho-West convention. And People magazine called him the Sexiest Man Alive in 1998 - when he was 56.

Stars don't come any bigger. And yet he looks so unhappy. Surly millionaires are not very attractive, but one can't blame him entirely for attitude.

At a press junket for Firewall - in which the actor plays what simply must be called a Harrison Ford Role (stalwart head of imperiled family) - Ford enters a room full of entertainment writers who act like the alpha ape had just walked in the room.

Ford looks great: trim, fashionably coiffed, an earring in his ear, a white-fringed goatee on his chin and his shoulders hunched in anticipation of idiotic questions. About carpentry (his old hobby). About the next Indiana Jones movie. About what defines a "Harrison Ford Movie" ("That's a movie that I'm in"), and about signing the assembled sycophants' press notes. He gets them all.

Ford looks far younger in person than his 63 years ("I'd date him," says co-star Virginia Madsen, 45). Even so, there are moments on screen, especially during Firewall's climactic fight scene with Paul Bettany, when Ford looks every bit his age - although there may have been mitigating circumstances. "It was the first Paul Bettany movie he'd done," Bettany deadpans. "I tried to put him at his ease."

But one doesn't get much whimsy out of Ford, who acts impatient and beleaguered in the presence of journalists, as if being a star of such immense wattage for so many years has gotten to be a pain the size of a Death Star.

During a one-on-one interview later in the day, he's asked if, like Cary Grant, Ford ever steps back and considers the phenomenon of "Harrison Ford" as something separate from himself, the way one might view, well ...

"A product?" Ford says helpfully. "I don't look at it like that. I try to calculate what's effective and how I can be effective and what kinds of roles the audience would like to see me in, and then sometimes I do what they want, and sometimes I don't.

"Because what's most important to me, besides serving the audience, is trying to keep the animal alive, try to face enough challenge and complexity to grow, hone skills, not stop trying to be better or stop trying to make it better so it stops being interesting."

Bettany, who calls Ford "almost a genre himself," says of the type of character Ford plays in Firewall, "he does that immaculately." And despite what some might call the familiarity of Firewall hero Jack Stanfield, Ford insists that the craft of acting and of tailoring a script to meet the needs of drama occupies him totally.

"I care passionately about what I'm offering the public with my face on it," he says.

The latest product, directed by Richard Loncraine, is a Desperate Hours-style thriller with high-tech accessories: Ford's Jack Stanfield is the security specialist for a Seattle bank and Bettany's character, Bill Cox, takes the Stanfield family hostage so Jack will let him into the bank's computer and thus make $10 million vanish. En route to the climax, there's quite a bit of pushing and shoving.

"It's all make-believe," says Ford, who did his own stunts - mostly. "One shot I knew was gonna hurt, and the guy who did it knew it was gonna hurt. We were both right.

"I don't do stunts," he adds. "I do physical acting. ... And I've been doing that for a long time and I know where to put the pads and how to do it safely."

It sounds like he directs when he acts. But Ford says he has less interest in expanding his repertoire than he does in perfecting it. And in the interest of making his work fit the story (and vice versa), he's willing to swing a little star power.

The success of his films, he says, "has allowed me to add conditions attached to my participation, which are not untypical of somebody in my relative position, which means at least consulting on the script, consulting on casting. And in this particular cast, I'm the only one who has power and therefore I exercise it on behalf of the project. Because if I can't make my part work, then everybody else's efforts will be wasted."

Said to be a popular figure among film crews, and the apparent apple of his co-stars' eyes, Ford is simply not an easy interview. Asked about that, he is straightforward. "It's not painful, it's not arduous," he says. "It's just that at times you have to be scrupulous about it. So I'm careful ...

"I just want to do what I came to do, which is talk about a movie I want to bring to the public. I'm not going to judge how difficult I am to interview."

- By John Anderson