“I’m excited for people to meet Helena,” Waller-Bridge tells Lucasfilm.com. “She’s a slippery fish, I’ll tell you. But she’s a lot of fun.”
Behind the scenes, Waller-Bridge was nervous stepping into the role opposite Harrison Ford. On her first day on set, Ford was busy filming a flashback sequence that would explore Indy’s capture by Nazi soldiers during the fall of Berlin in 1945. When that sequence wrapped, their first scene together leaped ahead nearly 25 years to reunite their two characters after nearly two decades apart — inside a New York City bar on the afternoon of Dr. Jones’ retirement from teaching. “It was actually our first scene [working] together. And it was quite a quiet scene,” she recalls during an interview alongside Ford. “And I said [to Harrison], ‘I feel a little nervous. If I ever do anything a bit rubbish, please tell me and I’ll do it again.’”
At one point, Ford rolled up his script and gave Waller-Bridge a playful smack in the head. “And then you went, ‘Did that help?’” she reminds her co-star. But as Ford got up to leave, he squeezed her shoulder and gave her some words of encouragement. “‘You’re doing good, kid,’” he said. “And I died.”