Harrison Ford shows no sign of settling into a comfortable, sedentary retirement. While most men his age are content to enjoy the odd round of golf, the 67-year-old star is preparing to step back into his khakis, crack that famous whip and tip his fedora for a fifth instalment of Indiana Jones.

“The story for the new Indiana Jones is in the playground equipment process of taking form,” the Hollywood veteran revealed last week while guest of honour at the Deauville film festival in France. “Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and I are agreed on what the fifth adventure will concern, and George is actively at work. If the script is good, I’ll be very happy to put the costume on again.”

There are plenty of reasons Ford might be keen to sign up for a final fling with the adventurous archeologist. For a start it will mean another bumper pay packet. Ford topped the list of Hollywood earners this summer, reportedly netting more than $65m (£40m) and seeing off younger rivals to become the highest-earning actor of the past 12 months, thanks to the success of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which took nearly £500m at the box office.

It is almost three decades since Indie’s first outing in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but despite his age — or maybe because of it — Ford continues to push the boundaries on and off screen. When he is not pretending to be Jones or the intergalactic smuggler Han Solo in Star Wars, or any one of a number of hard-as-nails fugitives and straight-talking CIA analysts, you will most likely find him flying one of his many private jets or tearing up the asphalt on his BMW motorbike. So it came as something of a surprise last weekend when pictures emerged from Deauville showing the tough-guy actor, eyes clearly wet with tears, visibly moved by the proceedings.

True to his no-nonsense form, Ford had flown his fiancée, Calista Flockhart, their adopted son, Liam, and himself 6,500 miles across the Atlantic in one of his Cessna aircraft to be the festival’s guest of honour. But the glowing tribute, with clips from his box-office hits, was all too much for Ford, who, despite starring in almost 40 films since his breakthrough in Star Wars in 1977, has never won an Oscar.

“I was embarrassed by it all,” he admits sheepishly when we meet later, still uncomfortable about publicly losing his cool. “I look at acting as a service occupation. I am grateful that people are interested in my career. If they didn’t support my lifestyle, then I’d be back as a passenger on commercial airlines.

“All I’ve done is to try to inflatable bouncers get scripts that interest me and make sure I prepare as well as I possibly can. I enjoy the process of film-making. It’s not an art, to me. More like a craft. The rest? You’d never catch me volunteering to walk along a red carpet at a premiere. Or attending a party.”

Ford is at pains to portray himself as just a regular guy, although he’s self-aware enough to realise that most people probably won’t find the everyman shtick entirely convincing. “I do the dishes. And I make dinner,” he said at Deauville, adding, with a touch of dry humour: “In the mornings I get my eight-year-old son Liam ready for school, and then I pass my time flying around in my planes. You see, I’m just like anybody else. My children are between eight and 42 and I’m also a grandfather.”

The earring that appeared in his left lobe about 10 years ago continues to attract raised eyebrows and suggestions of a long-running midlife crisis but Ford is as fit as many men half his age, keeping his 5ft 11in frame trim with daily tennis sessions and three workouts a week in his gym. Paul Bettany, the 38-year-old British actor who had to wrestle him to the ground in the 2006 film Firewall, admitted: “It was like trying to grapple with a rock.”

When you spend time in Ford’s company, what comes across is a certain shyness — or perhaps it is self-protection after so many years in the spotlight. His words come low and slow, without obfuscation. He is clearly much happier talking about his hobbies — aircraft, motorbikes and carpentry — than he is pondering the nuances of acting, film sets and directors. “It is horribly embarrassing to admit, but I hardly ever go to the movies,” he says. “I honestly cannot even remember the last movie I saw.”

The son of two occasional actors, Ford moved from Wisconsin to Los Angeles in 1964 to pursue an acting career too, but by the early 1970s he was earning a living as a carpenter. It was while working in the homes of Tinseltown’s rich and famous that he came to the game machines attention of an up-and-coming director called George Lucas and finally got his big break. Lucas cast him in a small but pivotal role in his 1973 film American Graffiti. Star Wars followed a few years later and, aged 35, Ford finally saw his career take off. Roles in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blade Runner, Witness, The Fugitive and Clear and Present Danger followed, to name but a few. Ford was box-office gold. Carpentry became a hobby.

“It (woodwork) was a skill and a joy to me,” Ford says. He set up a carpentry workshop at the ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that he bought in 1983 and continued to build barns and make additions around the house. It has since fallen into disuse, though. “I don’t have the time now,” he says. “I have also lost my tool skills. Or at least some of them. I suppose flying took over as my main passion, and there are only so many hours in the day.”

On any other day, you could expect a hefty fine for breaking the 70mph speed limit on Nevada’s state route 305. But this was a special occasion and the inflatable ­local traffic cops watched in awe as Sam Whittingham topped 80mph — on a push-bike.

The Canadian’s record-breaking cycle run took place on a dusty stretch of Nevada highway close to Battle Mountain, which had been closed intermittently to traffic to allow a bunch of two-wheeled speed freaks to vie for the title of fastest self-propelled human. It was all part of the World Human Powered Speed Challenge, an annual but little-known event that began on Tuesday and continued until yesterday evening.

Whittingham’s speed of 82.4mph beat by a whisker his previous record of 82.3mph, set in 2008. That may not sound fast, but when you consider that it’s twice the speed that Chris Hoy, the triple-Olympic-medal-winning cyclist, can hit on the track, it puts the feat in perspective. Whittingham, 37, is truly taking pedal power to another level.

“It hurt,” says Whittingham, catching his breath after his record-breaking run. “My timing, though, was perfect: with the sun setting on the desert, the tarmac was still warm, and there wasn’t a breath of wind.”
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Like Hoy, Whittingham is a former track cyclist; he now supports himself and pays for his record attempts by building bikes for others. The secret behind his superhuman pedal power is his Varna Tempest, a low-slung recumbent bicycle encased in inflatable bouncer a carbon fibre shell, with a Kevlar skin. “The Kevlar’s for protection,” Whittingham says. “If I crash at 80mph, the Kevlar stops the carbon disintegrating.”

Like a tailored suit, it is custom-built to fit Whittingham. “There isn’t an inch of room to spare, but apart from turning my legs, I don’t need to move much. At the speeds we’re talking about, steering basically involves gentle pressure on the handlebars. It’s incredibly noisy in there, but that noise tells me what’s happening with the bike. If the noise changes, I get anxious. If it’s quieter than normal then I’m probably in the air, and that’s not good.”

The bike is fast thanks to its super-streamlined shape and the fact that it’s less than 2ft high at it highest point. Then there are the tyres — ultra-thin slicks less than 1in across, which reduce rolling resistance to a minimum. And finally, there are the bike’s enormous gears: “It’s only got five,” explains Whittingham, “but even the lowest is harder to push than the highest gear on a standard racing bike.”

So hard, in fact, that it takes more than five miles for him to get his bike up to full speed. “I can reach 50mph in a mile,” he says, “but the effort required to get up to 80mph is exponential.”

“I have to time everything right, so that I get to the start of the 200-metre timing trap while I’m going flat-out. By that stage I’m completely spent, but I’m going so fast that even if I stopped ­pedalling I’d cover the 200 metres in five seconds.”

So what does it feel like to ride a bike at 82.4mph? “Like wheeeeeeeee!” Whittingham says with glee. “Like going downhill for five miles with an unbelievable tail wind. It’s the closest thing to flying without leaving the ground.”

And he’s still not satisfied. By the screen time you read this, Whittingham may have gone one better and achieved his ultimate goal of hitting 85mph.

If he succeeds, it will be the culmination of years of honing his machine and pushing his body to new limits of endurance and danger. Whittingham recalls how in 2003 he blew a tyre and crashed at more than 80mph. His bike flipped sideways, then flew through the air for almost 100 yards before spinning another 200 yards down the road. “It was scary as hell,” he says. “I didn’t know what was going to happen — the fastest anybody had crashed before that was about 70mph. Thankfully, I wasn’t hurt, but it took me a long time to get back in a bike after that.”

He’s now philosophical about the risks. “There’s no point worrying what’s going to happen, because there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m squeezed into this little bubble, I can’t move my head and I can’t move my arms more than an inch or two; all I can do is pedal my little speed capsule. At a certain point you’re committed, and turning back or second-guessing yourself at that point is the worst thing you can do.”