Carjackings and bar fights: Woody Harrelson’s miserable first day on ‘Cheers’
There’s nobody quite like Woody Harrelson, for better and for worse. You never know what he’s going to do next. One minute, he’s making us laugh in a comedy, the next he’s delivering some hard truths in an acclaimed drama.
One minute he’s advocating for prominent left-wing causes like legalising marijuana, the next, he’s claiming that germs don’t exist and telling people not to wear masks during a pandemic. On second thoughts, those last two points might be related…
The erratic, enigmatic Texan might be a big movie star these days, but it was the small screen that gave him his big break. When he was still in his early 20s, he joined the cast of Cheers, the biggest sitcom on TV. For the next eight seasons, his character (who was also called Woody) steadily grew in popularity, as Harrelson’s fame grew exponentially in real life. Now, he’s arguably the biggest name to come from that show, with the possible exception of Ted Danson.
It was Danson, who played Sam Malone on every season of the show, who recounted a young Harrelson’s first day on set to People. Danson remembers his newest co-star arriving at the studio in quite a state, claiming he had been in a bar fight and had gotten carjacked. Just as the then-more established name was getting suspicious, Harrelson did something that completely disarmed him. He asked him to read a poem he’d written.
“It’s like the most beautiful poem you’ve ever read,” he revealed. “And he’s like, ‘Would you come see the play I wrote?’ … and it’s a brilliant fucking play. You cannot pigeonhole that guy.” Danson went on to tell a story about how Harrelson, whom he described as “whimsical”, no-showed a rehearsal one day. “We were going, ‘Well, what the hell?’” he recalled. And someone came running in and said, ‘Woody called. He’s in Berlin. The wall is coming down and he didn’t wanna miss it.'”
Anyone who knows anything about Harrelson and his hedonistic lifestyle shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. In addition to the Berlin incident, he once blew off the show that made him famous to go and do “an extraordinary amount” of magic mushrooms instead. He was once arrested in Kentucky for planting hemp seeds in a protest against the state’s prohibitive laws surrounding marijuana. Basically, he does what he wants, when he wants, and it doesn’t always end well.
He once got into an altercation with a London taxi driver that resulted in a police chase and an eventual fine for the actor. He’s also been sued by a paparazzo for allegedly attacking the man and grabbing his camera outside a nightclub. Danson describes this attitude as “biting off these big chunks of life,” which he saw as his former co-star’s signature philosophy. Harrelson appears to live by his own set of rules and, whilst that can be fun to watch, it’s not always conducive to living in a larger society.
Whatever you make of Harrelson personally or professionally, he is certainly a captivating individual. Danson seems to be incredibly fond of him, despite being introduced to him under the most bizarre of circumstances.
