George Hall (November 19, 1916 – October 21, 2002) was an actor who played Old Indy in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

In preproduction meetings for the series, George Lucas indicated his desire to have Old Indy boast a facial scar and eyepatch, "but gave no backstory for the decision", though Hall chose which eye would be covered and stated that Lucas gave him no direct suggestions for playing the character beyond his physical appearance.[1] Despite "an intense scrutiny" of how Harrison Ford portrayed the role and initially adapting some of his facial expressions, Hall "felt artificial" and ultimately avoided using Ford's mannerisms, advising his co-stars Corey Carrier and Sean Patrick Flanery to do the same in relation to him:

They shouldn't look to me, because I'm a life they don't even know. I've experienced their lives; they haven't experienced mine. That would be imposing something upon them that would be totally foreign to them.[1]

To that end, Hall instead offered his own interpretation of Indy at this point in his life:

He's heroic in the sense that he's past the age of caring whether people appreciate what he's saying or not. He's old enough to know that truisms are truisms and should be believed because they are true. He's a good storyteller and he makes people want to listen to him and learn from listening to him. And then they go off and learn something else and continue the process of learning.[2]

During the original run of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Hall was featured in bookend segments for most of its episodes, including two ("Florence, May 1908" and "Transylvania, January 1918") which went unaired in the United States before the show was cancelled by ABC. Although this included bookends for the episodes "Chicago, April 1920" and "Chicago, May 1920" as shown in some territories,[3][4] new bookends with Harrison Ford were shot so the two segments could be edited together and aired on ABC as the TV movie Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues. Similarly, Hall filmed bookends for "New York, June 1920" and "New York, July 1920,"[5] episodes which were edited together and aired as Young Indiana Jones and the Scandal of 1920 without bookends.

The Old Indy segments were filmed by a second unit crew under the direction of Carl Schultz, with Hall required to wear makeup designed and applied by Bari Burman and Tom Burman for the role.[2] His scenes, set in what was then the present day (1992/1993), were shot at Carolco Studios and on location in Wilmington, North Carolina,[2][6] where Hall appreciated the "romance" of altering city venues to suit the show's purposes.[1] Filming a pair of bookends for an episode took a day or less, with seventeen bookends being completed in May 1992 alone.[1]

Although he declined to name any particular episode as a favourite, Hall had fond memories of working with Jane Wyatt as Vicky Prentiss on the bookends for "London, May 1916" and campaigned to have a two-hour series finale for The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles in which Old Indy and Old Vicky would marry.[1] However, he had no involvement in the later TV movies made for The Family Channel and his scenes were cut for the re-edited series The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, leaving it unclear whether the existence of Old Indy and the events of the bookends would still be considered part of the Indiana Jones canon by Lucasfilm.

Hall appeared in numerous Broadway and Off-Broadway productions over the course of several decades, beginning with Call Me Mister in 1946, and frequently worked on radio dramas such as Pepper Young's Family. His onscreen filmography is more limited, though his feature film credits include From the Hip (with John Hurt), Johnny Be Good, Her Majesty Mrs Brown, and Big Daddy; while his additional television credits include appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, the soap operas The Edge of Night and Ryan's Hope, and the TV movie Samson and Delilah (directed by Nicolas Roeg, with Paul Freeman and Elizabeth Hurley), as well as a regular role in the period dramedy Remember WENN (with Tom Beckett).

Like many entertainers during the Red Scare, Hall was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955.[7]

Appearances as Old Indy [ edit | edit source ]