For decades, the mystery surrounding Harrison Ford’s character, Rick Deckard, has helped the movie become one of the ’80s biggest cult titles. Deckard is a Blade Runner, a future cop who tracks down “replicants,” artificial humans who are almost identical to actual flesh-and-blood people. While Deckard appears to be a real man so do all the replicants, and through the years, Blade Runner director Ridley Scott has insisted that while he deliberately left Blade Runner ambiguous, he believed Ford’s character was secretly a replicant as well. That ambiguity was continued into Blade Runner 2049, where Ford reprised the role of Deckard without officially confirming Deckard’s origin one way or another.
Ford himself has always claimed in interviews that he believed Deckard was a human. You can google “Harrison Ford” and “replicant” for examples of it. This has literally been a discussion and debate that’s been going on for years, and Ford has always stuck to his guns about this: Deckard is not a replicant. But in a new interview with Esquire, Ford finally reversed himself — and conceded that he knew Deckard was a replicant all this time.
Asked to explain why Ridley Scott thinks Deckard is a replicant and he disagrees, Ford replied “I always knew I was a replicant, but I just wanted to push back against it.”
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Ford also gave a very plausible reason why, if he knew deep down that Deckard wasn’t a real human being, he continued to insist he was for years and years:
I think a replicant would want to believe that they were human, or at least this one did.
So there you have it. 40 years later, the debate is pretty much put to rest. I mean, if you want to interpret the film with Deckard as a human, you certainly can. But now both the director and the star disagree with you.
Ford will next be seen in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which opens in theaters on June 30. You can watch Ford’s entire interview with Esquire below.
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