Harrison Ford revealed that he battled severe depression when he was in college.
The “Star Wars” icon recalled that he’d “rarely venture out” of his single room at Ripon College in Wisconsin on Thursday’s episode of the Hollywood Reporter’s “Awards Chatter” podcast.
“I would get up out of my single bed, go to a phone, order a pizza, go back and lay down in bed until the pizza came,” Ford explained.
“I would eat the pizza, throw the wrappers in the corner, go back to sleep.”
The 83-year-old said that in the “rare” instances that he went to class, he’d just “touch the door on the outside of the building, and turn around and walk back.”
“I was more than depressed. I think I was ill,” Ford admitted. “I was socially ill, psychologically not well.”
Ford explained that he “never found a community” at the university — until he took a drama class to try to boost his low GPA.
But Ford didn’t realize that the class involving not just reading and analyzing plays, but also acting in them, which was his first experience ever in performing.
“And I was surprised that the people that I had considered to be fellow geeks and misfits were, in fact, some of the most interesting people I knew,” Ford shared.
“They were doing something that I hadn’t really understood, and they were telling stories about life and life, and those stories about life were informative and some of them were exceptional in their capacity to understand human behavior,” the “Shrinking” star continued.
Ford said that thanks to the drama class, he finally felt that he belonged.
“I think I simply found my place amongst storytellers,” he stated. “It was the story that gave me a focus and an opportunity to think about something and be part of it with a group of people.”
He added, “It really changed my world, changed my life.”
Ford studied philosophy in college, but four days before graduation, he was expelled for plagiarism.
“I had not been strict enough in controlling whose words I was using in my senior thesis,” he explained on the podcast. “And I was accused of and admitted that there was plagiarism.”
Elsewhere during the podcast, Ford noted he wouldn’t have had such a big career if it wasn’t for some of his earliest projects, like “American Graffiti,” “The Conversation” and the original “Star Wars.”
“I got to play leading parts because the films I was in had success, and that success carried me along,” he explained.
“And it has carried me along, but a big part of that success is being in the right place at the right time, luck, persistence,” Ford concluded.
