Ford has had to deal with all kinds of animals while playing archaeologist Indiana Jones, including snakes, spiders, and of course, rats. When asked how he felt about working with so many creepy crawly critters, he revealed that he was pretty in tune with Mother Nature and her children:
“Happily rats are another thing that don’t bother me very much. When I was a young teenager I was a nature councilor, and coincidentally I did have, as pets, black-footed rats. First two, and then pretty soon many, many, many more because they multiplied. So I was quite used to handling rats. Actually, I mean, they have personalities, rats do. Compared to snakes and insects.”
He then jokes about a freak accident where a man bites a rat and pretends to bite the little chonker he’s holding, showing his clear comfort with his co-star. Now, black-footed rats are a little different from the rats in “The Last Crusade,” as the former are Australian tree-dwellers, while the latter are the common brown rat, Rattus Norvegicus, the same species as most pet rats and the average New York subway dweller. Ford’s attitude with the rats is honestly really refreshing, because they get an unfair bad rap due to being blamed for carrying plague hundreds of years ago. (News flash: humans with fleas carried it just as readily as the rats, so they could blame us, too!)
