This Week's Cover: Blade Runner 2049 leads our First Look issue

It’s been 34 years since Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, set in 2019 dystopian Los Angeles and centered around Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a “blade runner” tasked with hunting and “retiring” (i.e. killing) rogue replicants (human-seeming androids), was released and changed the sci-fi genre as we knew it. On Oct. 6, 2017, fans will get to see its sequel, Blade Runner 2049, directed by Denis Villeneuve (Arrival) and starring Ryan Gosling as a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K, who unearths a secret 30 years after the events of the first film that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos — which leads him on a quest to find Deckard, who might have some answers.

There are movie stars and then there’s, well, Harrison Ford. “They say never meet your heroes,” Gosling tells EW. “But the addendum to that is: unless they’re Harrison Ford.” Of course, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t nervous about meeting Ford for the first time. “Harrison didn’t start working until a month into production, so we had a lot of time to just imagine how that might be, and waiting for that moment to come, and hoping that we were making something that would be satisfying to him,” Gosling says.

The day Ford finally arrived, the set happened to be engulfed in an atmospheric mist, and the curious cast and crew spent the day waiting for him to appear, almost literally out of thin air. “And then it was just unmistakably him — even in silhouette, you couldn’t miss it — and it was just such a relief,” he says. “He immediately put everyone at ease and went right to work.”

Later in production, to keep warm between takes, Gosling found himself shooting the breeze with Ford in an unexpected locale. “Talking to Harrison fully clothed in a hot tub is an experience I never thought I’d have,” Gosling says, laughing. “If you had told me a few years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

For more on Alcon Entertainment’s Blade Runner 2049, including exclusive photographs and interviews with the filmmakers and cast, pick up Entertainment Weekly‘s First Look Issue, on stands Friday, and subscribe for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW.