'I Was Ill': Harrison Ford Reveals He Was Severely Depressed and Would 'Rarely Venture Out' in College

Harrison Ford looked back on his very dark college days.

The Star Wars alum, 83, revealed on the Thursday, April 9, episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s “Awards Chatter” podcast that he suffered from severe depression when he was younger.

Ford would “rarely venture” out of his solo dorm room while residing at Ripon College in Wisconsin.

“I would get up out of my single bed, go to a phone, order a pizza, go back and lie down in bed until the pizza came,” he recalled. “I would eat the pizza, throw the wrappers in the corner, go back to sleep.”

The “rare” times he did go to class, he would “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,” he disclosed. “I was socially ill, psychologically not well.”

The 83-year-old struggled to find friends and “never found a community” in college until he enrolled in drama class to improve his GPA.

“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,” he explained. “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 drama class unexpectedly boosted Ford’s mental health and gave him a sense of community he had been lacking.

“I think I simply found my place amongst storytellers,” he remembered. “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. It really changed my world, changed my life.”

In a 2023 interview, Ford addressed rumors he struggled with another mental health disorder: social anxiety.

“I don’t have a social anxiety disorder. I have an abhorrence of boring situations,” he clarified. “I wasn’t shy, I was f------ terrified. My knees would shake so badly, you could see it from the back of the theater. But that’s not social anxiety. That’s being unfamiliar with the territory.”

Elsewhere on Thursday’s podcast episode, Ford made a shocking admission about his final days at the university, revealing he was expelled for plagiarism just four days before graduation.

“I had not been strict enough in controlling whose words I was using in my senior thesis,” he recalled. “And I was accused of and admitted that there was plagiarism.”