Imposing pattern and form on the life of Woody Harrelson is a task that would elude even the most ardent biographer. The vegan actor and hemp activist can’t even approach a lunch table without getting sidetracked into some improbable, colourful vignette. I wait in the most discreet nook of the Soho House in Los Angeles, 14 stories up, overlooking the flats of Beverly Hills. Harrelson arrives and offers out a hand to shake, only to veer off and start chatting like old friends with a bunch of large, bling-covered black men.
“That’s Miles Davis’s kid,” he explains when he finally settles onto the corner sofa. “Pretty freaking cool man.”
Harrelson carries a big kid’s air of mischief and delight about him, even with his shaggy grey-flecked beard. He looks radiantly trim at 52, quite at home in skinny white jeans and sneakers.
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“I just walked up to this dude on my way in,” he laughs, “thinking it was Sam Rockwell [his co-star in the 2012 black comedy Seven Psychopaths] and almost slapped him – just to f--- with him. I was so psyched because I thought it was Sam. But the guy put his hand up to his face, looking up unmistakably like he doesn’t know me…” He shakes his head and laughs – a rednecky chuckle full of unintended menace. “I just had to say ‘Sorry, you looked like someone else.’”
The story gives a disconcerting glimpse of Harrelson’s old hell-raising side, which last flared up in 2009 when he attacked a paparazzo claiming he mistook him for a zombie. The duality in his nature is understandably extreme: he grew up in Texas raised by a God-fearing mother, while his father, who left the family early on, was later convicted of murder. He died in jail in 2007.
These past few years, though, the self-proclaimed Happy Hippy has been nothing but mellow, relaxing on his eco-farm in Maui in Hawaii with his wife and three daughters and saving all his intensity for the screen.
Woody Harrelson and his wife Laura Louie (Credit: Startraks Photo/REX)
He came to fame aged 24 in the sitcom Cheers, playing fresh-faced barman Woody Boyd, a lovable dunce of a hick, so literal minded that he could be unwittingly clever. (Customer: “I’m looking for a yellow-bellied, runny-nosed has-been.” Woody: “Hmm, I can’t make one of those – I’m out of cassis.”) Crucially, television Woody was a straight arrow and irresistibly sweet, as when he serenaded his rich Wasp fiancée with his self-penned song from the heart: “Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, K-E-L-L-Y.”
I loved the show – the barroom misfits were my surrogate family – so after 201 episodes, it took me a while to adjust to Harrelson as he broke free from typecasting with a vengeance. (Having the same name as his Cheers character presumably only added fuel to the fire.) In a few short years, he played a serial killer in Natural Born Killers, a basketball hustler in White Men Can’t Jump, and a crippled pornographer in The People vs. Larry Flynt, which earned him the first of two Oscar nominations. (The second was for his role as Army lifer Capt Tony Stone in 2009’s ethical drama The Messenger). Of all the Cheers cast, against all the odds, he has gone on to have the finest, most varied movie career. Esquire called him “the dopey middle brother who somehow made it big”.
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He claims he’s lazy (“I’ll lollygag till the cows come home”) but maybe he just makes hard work look like fun. The list of the directors he’s worked with includes such greats as Oliver Stone, the Coen brothers, Robert Altman, Milosˇ Foreman, Barry Levinson and Terrence Malick.
Harrelson orders some green tea to “quicken the neurons” and sets about discussing his role in his new film, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. It’s the sequel to the 2012 adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s science-fiction novel, The Hunger Games, which grossed $691 million worldwide. Except with Harrelson, it’s never a linear process. He has Southern manners (“This spot is great”; “Thank you kindly”) and a Southern pace of conversation to match. It’s a mistake to fill in his pauses. That said, today turns out to be unusually dilatory. He rubs his face and disappears behind his hands. After a long pause, he asks in all sincerity: “What day is it today?”
Woody Harrelson in The People vs. Larry Flynt (Credit: Sidney Baldwin)
He’s been on the PR treadmill for a week and clearly misses home (“I just can’t wait to get back. I love it, man. I really do love it”), but there’s also the small matter of Saturday night, which he spent gambling and playing pool with his younger brother until six in the morning. “Course I was drinking tequila the whole night. I’m literally still recovering.” This is two days later we’re talking about. “They woke me up after three hours to go the red-carpet premiere. It was like a betrayal.”
His character in the Hunger Games series, Haymitch Abernathy, is no stranger to hard liquor either. Set in the totalitarian dystopian nation of Panem, the games of the title are televised contests in which citizens from the country’s poorest districts fight to the death for the amusement of the rich inhabitants of the “Capitol”. Abernathy is a drink-addled former winner of the games, charged with mentoring the two most telegenic contestants so they survive to the end and keep the ratings aloft. He is an amusingly slippery mentor, steering his charges with a raffish mix of manipulation and sarcasm.
The key to playing the part, says Harrelson, was calibrating in the right level of inebriation.
“I didn’t play it like… What’s his name?… Oh, I love what he did… You know… What’s his name?”
I throw out some names of drunken movie exemplars. Paul Newman in The Sting…? Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend…?
“No, this was just recently. He does all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.”
Erm… Johnny Depp?
“Yeah. I love the way he plays that.” One can only marvel at his complete absence of embarrassment about not being able to remember, oh, you know, the biggest movie star in the world.
“I had a whole conversation with Gary Ross, who directed the first film, about how far to go with it. I’m one who likes to go over the top if possible. But we kept it light. The people who are perpetually drunk that I’ve met, you can’t really tell. I saw a goodly number of those guys in London. Literally, they’ve had eight drinks and you cannot tell at all.” He squeezes wedges of lemon into his tea. “That is a culture where people learn to hold their drink.”
Harrelson got to know London pretty well in 2005, while he starred in Tennessee Williams’s Night of the Iguana in the West End. “That’s a city you can really ride your bike around. I lived out in Islington and worked in the West End. It was taking me an hour to get to work by car. Then one day I rode a bike in – 10 minutes.”
Jenny Seagrove and Woody Harrelson in 'The Night of the Iguana' at the Lyric Theatre (REX)
As his head clears, he expounds on the lack of a comprehensive public transport system in Los Angeles. This is his impassioned activist side, and it’s one that developed early. When he was 12, he wrote a 50-page paper about deforestation. At high school, he gave full-length sermons.
It’s one of the reasons he was attracted to the Hunger Games books. “She [author Suzanne Collins] is also making a point about what’s going in the world. I remember reading Orwell as a kid and the only thought is, ‘Of course, this is Russia’. You never think it could be your country that has a despotic government.”
The Republicans’ government shutdown still animates him. “It’s despicable,” he says. “It is, it’s despicable. If you want to control the budget, all you have to look at is how much do wars cost. And how justifiable are these wars?”
A waiter tentatively offers to take our food orders. For Harrelson, this consists of ordering all the vegetable dishes he can find and purging them of cheese. “The kale-quinoa thing without the ricotta… The guacamole with the tarot root chips… Brussels sprouts… That’d be good. Without the Parmesan though. Oh yeah. I like that cauliflower. What’s a roasted sunchoke?”
“It’s a root vegetable with the consistency of a potato.”
“All right. That too. Thank you.”
He gave up dairy products when he was a struggling actor in New York after a random passer-by noticed his streaming nose and acne. She diagnosed him as lactose intolerant and three days later he was mucus-free. The animal rights group Peta named him top of their list of Sexiest Vegetarian Celebrities last year. Needless to say, his dietary discipline doesn’t preclude marijuana. “I’ve always been relatively healthy,” he likes to quip, “except for my vices.” His recipe for adult brownies includes a half cup of hemp oil, infused with something called “Haymitch’s Herb”.
Woody Harrelson as his character in the Hunger Games series, Haymitch Abernathy (Credit: Murray Close)
As for alcohol, he certainly puts his money where his mouth is. He is the owner of the world’s first organic vegan beer garden. Called Sage, it is a hipster paradise in Culver City serving kombucha floats and walnut sausage Florentines. “My friend Molly has the original Sage in Echo Park,” he explains. “I just believed in her and turns out it was the right thing to believe in.”
He shovels piles of sprouts and kale my way. “Did you try this yet? Oh my God. This is really good.”
Despite the reverberations of his hangover, he enthusiastically discusses a recent organic beer tasting for the restaurant. “I got my friends Danny and Rhea and their kids and started going through them. It was very thorough. We had to make sure there were no duds. You should go check it out sometime. It’s a great place to have some good beer.”
Danny and Rhea, I twig, are the DeVitos. Rhea Perlman played the fearsome waitress Carla Tortelli on Cheers and he says the cast still keep in touch.
Surely George Wendt, who played burly boozer Norm Peterson, would have been the ideal beer tester? “I wanted him, but he was in New York or something. I wish we saw each other more. I had eight years on the show, eight formative years… It led to the life I’ve developed in some ways.”
One suspects Harrelson would live an equally incident-packed life even without his fame. He has that unprepossessing, salt-of-the-earth quality, which enables certain lucky people to be happy in all manner of circumstances. He can snap, obviously. He has trashed taxi cabs, gone on epic benders and will cut interviewers short if he’s tired. (Don’t ask dumb questions about pot or hairpieces.) But generally he is infectiously good humoured with a real air of spontaneity, hence the endless stream of escapades.
The Harrelson clippings are a litany of picturesque gems and I run through some of his greatest hits with him. He plays poker with Willie Nelson. His farm in Hawaii boasts five different types of avocado. He was once late to the set of Cheers because he’d “gone to the fall of the Berlin Wall”. His father was a contract killer of a federal judge. His younger brother can climb 150 stairs on his hands. He goes kite surfing among sharks. He had sex with three women a day. He owns an eco-paper mill. He was room-mates with the Farrelly brothers long before they were famous. He once fought off a gang of hooligans armed only with two stones.
Woody Harrelson with his 'Cheers' co-star, Ted Danson (Credit:Moviestore Collection / Rex Feat)
He listens and doesn’t object, just gives a shrug and a smile as if to say, “that’s not even the half of it”.
The most impressive claim, to my mind, is that he got the Coen brothers to change a line of dialogue during the making of No Country for Old Men.
“I’m one of those actors who is going to come in with 2,500 ideas,” he told Interview magazine in 2009. “You can shoot down 2,499, but one of them you’re going to like.”
Harrelson got the acting bug at high school and studied English and theatre arts at Hanover College, Indiana. “One of my real influences was [my college professor] Doc Evans. He was a one-man theatre department – pretty good guy. He was tough. I remember one acting exercise, he kinda came in and he took his pants down in class. He was making a point about acting and embarrassing yourself, allowing yourself to be a fool… Standing there in his underwear.”
Did he get a big laugh?
“It actually did. It was one of those lessons that kind of crystallises something for you. His point was don’t be boring, don’t blend, go for it.”
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Harrelson admits he struggled with nerves on stage for a long time. In his early acting pictures, he is always gripping the lapel of his jacket. He gets up and demonstrates, as if he’s in a stiff drawing-room comedy. “It’s the actor’s self-consciousness. You’ll see it a lot, even in TV shows. If you really look, some actor will grab on to his coat and not let go. It could be anything though. It’s like a handrail.”
His big lift-off moment came in a college production of The Madwoman of Chaillot. “You ever hear of it? French play? They made it into a movie with Katharine Hepburn.”
Fortified by his vegan feast, he’s firing on all cylinders now. “I played a policeman and I was terrible. I was so boring and unattached. So I went and talked to the lead actor. His name’s Doug. If you cut to a couple of years later, he stayed on our couch in New York for months. Anyway, he gave me some really good advice. If you don’t like what you’re doing, change it. He said, just change the way you’re speaking, change the way you dress… I started working on this weird way of talking. I pulled up my trousers so you could see my white socks and started walking funny.
“Opening night, I enter upstage and go off downstage without staying a word and the audience all clapped. One of the actors said, ‘What did you do?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but I’m definitely doing it again.’”
And with that, it’s time for Harrelson to be chaperoned off to his next assignment, appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
“I don’t have anything prepared. I’m sure there’s people devising stuff, but I’d rather not know and be surprised…”
You go rogue?
“I go rogue.”
He bids farewell after signing my “Last Call” Cheers T-shirt, commemorating the final episode on May 20 1993. It reads, “Peace Bro, Woody Harrelson.”
Eleven hours later, he tells Jimmy Kimmel all about his epic weekend. By breakfast time, the headlines read: “Woody Harrelson admits he was so hung-over he could barely stand at premiere!”
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is released on November 21
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