Harrison Ford Cut Part of His Finger Off During First Job as Cook

Harrison Ford is recalling some misadventures during his time as a cook, years before his acting career took off.

On Tuesday, Oct. 8, Ford, 82, sat down with Jimmy Kimmel for a wide-ranging conversation to promote his Apple TV+ series Shrinking on Jimmy Kimmel Live. As the pair spoke about cooking, Ford reminisced that he worked as a chef “for relatively short periods of time, until they found out about me and fired me.”

“My first job was I cooked at a hospital. I don’t know what I told them but they gave me a knife and a bunch of carrots, and I cut this part of my finger off within minutes,” he said, displaying his left index finger for Kimmel, 56.

“But the sew-your-finger-back-on department was right down the hall, and right after that was where they fire you for lying about [his cooking skills],” he joked.

Kimmel also shared that he has cut off parts of his fingertips multiple times while cooking at home, to which Ford jested, “But you weren’t taking money for cooking at the time? That’s why I’m a criminal and you’re not.”

While Ford said he never worked in a restaurant, he also recalled working as a cook on a yacht in Chicago, for people “far beyond my means at the time.”

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“In Chicago, I was working on a yacht that was owned by the youngest bank president in Chicago at the time. He had a yacht and a boutonnière. . . and he was a nice guy, but he didn’t know much about cooking,” he said. “But he was heir to the Swift meatpacking factory, so all I had to do was buy really expensive beef.”

“Yup, anybody can do that,” Ford added of grilling beef.

Ford, a Hollywood legend best known for his roles in Star Wars and the Indiana Jones series, famously worked a number of odd jobs before hitting it big in Los Angeles. He even first auditioned to play Star Wars‘ Han Solo just because he happened to be performing carpentry work for Francis Ford Coppola when George Lucas arrived to audition Richard Dreyfuss for the same role.

Shrinking season 2 premieres on Apple TV+ Oct. 16.