Woody Harrelson

• 1. Introduction

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  Woody Harrelson arrived in Lee County, Kentucky, on the 1st of June 1996 with a camera crew from CNN and an agent. His attorney was Louie B. Nunn, a former governor of the state. The mission was to plant four hemp seeds and challenge a state law that made no distinction between industrial hemp and marijuana. From a local hotel, Harrelson phoned the county sheriff, Junior Kilburn, and told him exactly where to find him.

  Kilburn and Deputy Sheriff Danny Towsend turned up at the spot. With the cameras rolling, Harrelson pushed the seeds into the ground. Kilburn then arrested him for cultivating marijuana and booked him into the county jail. Harrelson walked out the same day on $200 bail, and he later signed autographs and posed for photos with the deputies. With Nunn's help, he was acquitted after just 25 minutes. The episode became part of a 2010 documentary by Michael P. Henning, titled Hempsters: Plant the Seed.

  Seven Primetime Emmy nominations and three Academy Award nominations sit on the same career as that Kentucky arrest. How does a man with a father in prison for murder end up pouring drinks on network television and later competing for Oscars? Why does an actor with such a polished screen record keep stepping into public confrontations with the law and with the powerful? And what do a raw vegan diet, a chess game against a world champion, and a live film shot in one take reveal about him? The answers start in West Texas.

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• 2. Born Into Shadow

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  Midland, Texas, is where Woodrow Tracy Harrelson was born on the 23rd of July 1961. His mother, Diane Lou, worked as a secretary. His father, Charles Voyde Harrelson, was a convicted contract killer. The family was poor and lived on his mother's wages. Harrelson grew up in a Presbyterian household with two brothers, Jordan and Brett, and Brett would also become an actor.

  The 1979 killing of federal judge John H. Wood Jr. sent Charles Harrelson to prison for life. Woody has said he had little contact with his father while growing up. Charles died in the United States Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum Facility, on the 15th of March 2007.

  Houston, Texas, was where he attended The Briarwood School. In 1973 he moved to Lebanon, Ohio, his mother's native city, and he graduated from Lebanon High School in 1979. After that came Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana, where he studied theater and English. He joined the Sigma Chi fraternity and became friends with a fellow student, Mike Pence, who later became vice president. Harrelson graduated in 1983, and Hanover would honor him again in 2014 with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.

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• 3. The Bartender Years

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  In 1985, during the fourth season of the NBC sitcom Cheers, Harrelson joined the cast as the bartender Woody Boyd. He stayed for the show's final eight seasons, through 1993. The role brought five Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series, and he won once, in 1989.

  The same year he joined Cheers, he married Nancy Simon, daughter of the playwright Neil Simon, in Tijuana, Mexico. It was never meant to be serious. The couple planned to divorce the next day, but the storefront marriage and divorce parlor was closed when they returned. They stayed married for another ten months.

  Wildcats, a 1986 football comedy with Goldie Hawn, was his first film, and Wesley Snipes made his debut in it too. In 1990 Harrelson appeared in the romantic comedy Cool Blue alongside Hank Azaria. He teamed up with Snipes again for the box-office hit White Men Can't Jump in 1992 and for the action movie Money Train in 1995.

  In 1993 he starred opposite Robert Redford and Demi Moore in the drama Indecent Proposal. It earned over $265,000,000 worldwide. The following year, the Golden Raspberry Awards named his performance in it the Worst Supporting Actor. Darker parts came next, including Mickey Knox in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and Dr. Michael Raynolds in Michael Cimino's The Sunchaser.

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• 4. Stage Lights and Penalty Kicks

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  During the winter of 2005-2006, Harrelson returned to London's West End to star in Tennessee Williams' Night of the Iguana at the Lyric Theater. His screen work in those years was busy and varied. In 2003 he played Galaxia, also called Gary, in the comedy Anger Management. He also appeared in the action film After the Sunset and in Spike Lee's She Hate Me.

  Two 2005 releases, The Big White and North Country, kept him working. That year he also played Kelly Ryan, the husband of a contest-obsessed woman, in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio. In 2006 he made two films. One was the animated Free Jimmy, and the other was A Scanner Darkly, written and directed by Richard Linklater.

  Hart House Theatre in Toronto hosted Bullet for Adolf, a play Harrelson wrote with Frankie Hyman and directed himself, from the 21st of April to the 7th of May 2011. The production opened Off-Broadway at New World Stages, with previews beginning on the 19th of July 2012. It closed on the 30th of September 2012 and canceled an announced extension through the 21st of October. New York critics panned it.

  Old Trafford in Manchester was the setting on the 6th of June 2010 for Soccer Aid, a charity match for UNICEF UK broadcast live on ITV. Harrelson came on as a substitute for Gordon Ramsay and played the last 15 minutes. After a 2-2 draw, he took the final penalty in the shootout. He was unsure at first where the kick had to be taken, yet he scored and won the game for the Rest of the World over England. Afterward he said he "didn't even remember the moment of scoring."

  In 2011 he played Tommy in Friends with Benefits. He also narrated ETHOS, a film about a modern society destroying itself under unequal power and failed democratic ideals. A rematch on the 27th of May 2012 ended 3-1 to England.

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• 5. Prestige and Franchises

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  The Hunger Games in 2012 introduced Harrelson as Haymitch Abernathy, a role he repeated in all three later films, the last released in 2015. That same year he led the HBO film Game Change as Steve Schmidt, the strategist on John McCain and Sarah Palin's 2008 presidential campaign. Julianne Moore, Sarah Paulson and Ed Harris co-starred, Jay Roach directed, and Danny Strong wrote it. The performance drew nominations for a Primetime Emmy, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

  On the 3rd of February 2012 he took part in an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit. It went badly. He gave no meaningful answers and soon refused anything unrelated to his upcoming crime drama Rampart. That film earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Male Lead.

  True Detective brought him back to television in 2014, opposite Matthew McConaughey in the HBO series' first season. Harrelson played Marty Hart, a Louisiana cop investigating murders spread across 17 years. Both actors received Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, and Bryan Cranston won for the final season of Breaking Bad. In 2015, Harrelson and his daughter Zoe appeared in a 7-minute short film for U2's "Song for Someone."

  The Academy Awards have honored him with three nominations. The first was Best Actor for playing Larry Flynt in the 1996 drama The People vs. Larry Flynt. The second was Best Supporting Actor for The Messenger in 2009, where he played a Gulf War veteran. The third came for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri in 2017, in which he played police chief Bill Willoughby. That role also earned a Screen Actors Guild nomination.

  In 2017 he played the antagonist The Colonel in War for the Planet of the Apes and starred in The Glass Castle, adapted from Jeannette Walls's memoir. In 2018 he played Tobias Beckett, mentor to Han Solo, in Solo: A Star Wars Story. He also made a cameo as Cletus Kasady at the end of Venom. He returned as the main villain in the 2021 sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and voiced Carnage.

  Starting in 2019, Saturday Night Live had him play Joe Biden several times until Jim Carrey replaced him. That year he also starred with Kevin Costner in The Highwaymen. In November he played Admiral Chester Nimitz in Roland Emmerich's Midway, and he returned as Tallahassee in Zombieland: Double Tap.

  HBO's White House Plumbers, released in 2023, cast him as intelligence officer E. Howard Hunt in a series about the Watergate scandal. Harrelson also served as an executive producer. That year's Champions put him in the role of a disgraced coach forced to lead a Special Olympics basketball team, with many actors with special needs in the cast.

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• 6. Scrapes and Single Takes

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  In 2006, according to a 2008 lawsuit, a TMZ photographer named Josh Levine was attacked outside a Hollywood nightclub. A video of the incident appeared to show Harrelson grabbing a camera and clashing with the photographer. Los Angeles prosecutors declined to press charges. Levine still filed a suit that summer asking for $2.5 million in damages. The case was dismissed in April 2010.

  London in 2002 produced a different kind of trouble. Harrelson was arrested after an incident in a taxi that ended in a police chase. He was taken to a police station and later released on bail. The case was dismissed after he paid the taxi driver involved £550, or $844.

  In 2016, Harrelson announced he would direct, write, produce and star in a film drawn from that night. Lost in London was shot as a single take and premiered live on the 19th of January 2017.

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• 7. Causes and Convictions

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  Since 2003, Harrelson has sat on the advisory board of NORML, the group that campaigns for marijuana legalization. He also appeared as a guest on Ziggy Marley's track "Wild and Free," which urges people to grow cannabis. His business interests have followed the same line. On the 13th of May 2022 he opened The Woods WeHo, a cannabis dispensary off Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. In September 2023 he announced The Holistic Spirits Company, a plant-based spirits brand based in Utah that he co-founded.

  Activism has also taken him up a bridge. He once climbed the Golden Gate Bridge with members of North Coast Earth First! and unfurled a banner reading, "Hurwitz, aren't ancient redwoods more precious than gold?" It targeted Charles Hurwitz, the CEO of Maxxam Inc., who had once said, "He who has the gold, makes the rules." In September 2007 Harrelson attended the PICNIC'07 festival in Amsterdam. He also crossed the west coast of the United States by bike and domino caravan with a biodiesel bus fueled by hemp oil. That tour with the Spitfire Agency became the subject of the independent documentary Go Further. He narrated the 1999 documentary Grass and briefly owned an oxygen bar in West Hollywood called O2. In October 2009, York University gave him an honorary degree for his work in environmental education, sustainability and activism.

  Harrelson describes himself as an anarchist, and he calls the historian Howard Zinn a personal hero. His opposition to war goes back to the First Gulf War. He protested at UCLA and toured colleges in Iowa and Nebraska in 1991 under the name "Woody Harrelson Educational Tours." In 2002 he wrote an article in The Guardian calling President George W. Bush's preparations for invading Iraq a "racist and imperialist war." He also opposed President Bill Clinton's sanctions against Iraq.

  In 2013 he condemned President Barack Obama for failing to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, comparing him unfavorably with Richard Nixon. In 2017 he told the Associated Press: "We have a guy running this country who has unearthed a lot of bigotry and a lot of racism, and it seems to be more virulent than ever." In 2023 he appeared to endorse Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In May 2024, Kennedy's campaign released a short documentary about its candidate's life and career, narrated by Harrelson.

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• 8. Faith, Chess and Home

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  Laura Louie, who co-founded the organic food delivery service Yoganics, married Harrelson in 2008. They met in 1987, when she was working as his personal assistant. The couple live in Maui, Hawaii, and have three daughters, born in 1993-1996 and 2006.

  Harrelson follows a raw vegan diet that excludes meat, dairy, sugar and flour. During the filming of Zombieland, where his character loves Twinkies, the snacks were swapped for vegan imitations made from cornmeal. In 2011 he appeared on a PhotoStamp as one of PETA's 20 famous vegetarians. In 2012 PETA named him its Sexiest Vegetarian, a title shared with Jessica Chastain.

  Theology was one of his subjects in college. Speaking to Playboy in October 2009, he said: "I was getting into theology and studying the roots of the Bible, but then I started to discover the man-made nature of it." He concluded that the Bible was "just a document to control people," yet he describes himself as having "a strong spiritual life."

  In April 2020, Harrelson posted on Instagram promoting the conspiracy theory that links 5G networks to COVID-19, and he later deleted it. In May 2022 he said he "doesn't believe in the germ theory" and called face masks against COVID-19 "absurd."

  Chess is a longtime passion. In 1999 in Prague, playing White and using the Parham Attack, he drew against World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov. Several Grandmasters who had come to watch the match between Alexei Shirov and Judit Polgár helped him. He made the ceremonial first move at the 2016 World Chess Championship in New York City. In November 2018 he did the same in London, at the opening game between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana.

  In 2020 he was seen practicing Brazilian jiu-jitsu on a film set, having earned the first stripe on his white belt. He is also a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

  In 2023, Matthew McConaughey said that he and Harrelson could be half-brothers. McConaughey's mother claimed to have been intimate with Charles Harrelson around the time McConaughey was conceived. The man in the Kentucky jail is still tied to the one in prison.

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