The drug-fuelled movie shoot that made Woody Harrelson look like a saint by comparison: “I was Mother Teresa on this one”
Having been one of Hollywood’s most famous potheads for decades, everyone knows that Woody Harrelson has spent the bulk of his career engaged in a long-running love affair with copious amounts of marijuana.
He did kick his habit at one stage, though, only for Willie Nelson – a celebrity spliff enthusiast who puts almost everybody else to shame – to knock him off the wagon. For the most part, Harrelson had tended to stay away from the harder stuff, which made him the saintliest presence on a production defined by its excess away from the cameras.
One of the most controversial films of its era, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, became a lightning rod for bad press. While the Quentin Tarantino-scripted crime thriller has evolved into a cult classic, the backlash towards the cross-country killing spree at the story’s centre was vast and all-encompassing, especially when it was directly cited and implicated in several real-life crimes.
The negativity broke Harrelson’s heart, but while the movie was shooting, it sounded like everyone was having a good time. Or, at the very least, a suitably drug-fuelled time. Harrelson will admit to smoking a remarkable amount of pot during his time, but even he was left staggered by the narcotics-induced debauchery that plagued Natural Born Killers both on the set and away from it.
Co-star Juliette Lewis shared Harrelson’s affinity for weed, but she was also battling an addiction to painkillers and cocaine, which saw her check into rehab two years after Natural Born Killers‘ 1994 release and ultimately quit drugs altogether at the age of only 22.
Stone, meanwhile, had a long history of experimenting with cocaine, hallucinogens, and psychedelics, including LSD, mescaline, mushrooms, and ayahuasca, and Robert Downey Jr was in a class of his own. The actor admitted that he shouldn’t have been anywhere other than an emergency room at one stage during production, which left Harrelson as the unlikely voice of reason.
“I have to say, it was a zoo in the sense the actors were all on different kinds of trips,” the director told Esquire. “I think Woody was the most sane.” Harrelson was no stranger to a wild night out on the town, but he conceded that everyone else working on Natural Born Killers blew him out of the water.
“I will say this, and Oliver reassured me of this: I don’t want to say I was the moral centre of this movie, but I was doing the least amount of drugs,” he confirmed. “Which is, it’s never happened in my career or my life. And no one’s ever done more drugs than me, but I was Mother Teresa on this one.”
Using Harrelson as the barometer of good behaviour even took him by surprise, which speaks to the sheer volume of drug-addled chaos Natural Born Killers had to contend with.
