“No harm was intended”: the night in 1991 when Michael J Fox and Woody Harrelson had a drunken barroom brawl
While it doesn’t seem too out of the ordinary for Woody Harrelson to find himself caught up in a drunken barroom brawl, the thought of Michael J Fox being his booze-soaked sparring partner definitely is.
The Back to the Future frontman was generally viewed as a clean-cut, wholesome, and endearing star who rarely, if ever, put a foot wrong in the public eye. However, everyone has their secrets behind closed doors, and Fox spent years hiding the fact that he was becoming increasingly reliant on alcohol.
He first started showing symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in early 1991, and in a misguided attempt to cope with the devastating diagnosis, he turned to the bottle. By the end of the following year, he was sober, and he has been ever since, but he still found the time to throw hands with Harrelson.
The Cheers alum, who Mark Ruffalo revealed he had to drag away from a bar fight when they were shooting Now You See Me in New Orleans, almost got his ass kicked by a band of Croatian martial artists, punched a man at a rooftop bar, and got sued for attacking a photographer, seems more likely to get caught up in that sort of thing.
The two were, and are, close friends, but during their off-time from shooting 1991’s Doc Hollywood, their playfighting took a more serious turn. “For some reason, after an indeterminable amount of alcohol consumption, we’d find some excuse to start kicking over chairs and stage elaborate mock brawls,” Fox explained.
“No harm was intended, and the majority of punches were pulled, but Woody is a foot taller and 50 pounds heavier than me, which meant that whenever the game got out of hand, I was always the one that took the most serious ass-kicking,” he continued. “So, maybe I’d caught a Harrelson haymaker to the side of the head.”
He couldn’t really remember, though, with Fox’s recollections extending to a visit to a bar, where they “had one of our legendary drunken slap fights.” The star was so pissed that he couldn’t recall the specifics, but he does remember what happened when he got back to his hotel room, with his bodyguard having to prop him up against the door so he could unlock and enter his suite.
When he got the door open, he stumbled forward, fell over, and landed headfirst on a table. “Any pain in my head was from boozing, not bruising,” he noted, not that it makes it any better. He was on a slippery downward slope, regardless of whether he’d been slapping Harrelson around or he was getting slapped around by Harrelson, but he was looking for anything to distract himself from the Parkinson’s bombshell.
It worked for a while, but when his wife and young son discovered him passed out on the living room couch after another blackout drinking session in 1992, with a spilt can of beer lying on the floor next to him, he decided then and there that his drinking days were over.
