The one skill Woody Harrelson failed to master for a movie: “He was shockingly bad”
One of the fringe benefits of being an actor is that you often get the chance to learn a new skill to inhabit a character fully. This can manifest as needing to learn a new language, drive a motorcycle, or handle guns like a military veteran. Equally, though, sometimes it can be as simple as sharpening your skills on something people regularly do for fun. When Woody Harrelson signed up for a 1996 comedy, for instance, he was tasked with mastering a sport anyone can turn their hand to – but he was so abysmal at it that it shocked his directors.
To be fair to Harrelson, he probably didn’t expect to be so terrible at this particular sport. After all, he’d already proven in the early ’90s that he had athletic skill when he signed up for White Men Can’t Jump and was sent to a month-long basketball camp to develop his innate ability on the court. He excelled so much during this camp that Bob Lanier, the movie’s basketball coach and an NBA Hall of Famer, declared him on the same level as a Division II college baller. He even noted that Harrelson eclipsed his co-star Wesley Snipes during training and filming.
So, when Harrelson agreed to star in Kingpin, a comedy co-directed by his old roommate Peter Farrelly, he could have been forgiven for thinking it would be a piece of cake to hone his ten-pin bowling skills. After all, bowling is a sport that can be played while sinking pints of beer and eating nachos, so it requires a hell of a lot less athleticism than basketball. Unfortunately, though, he turned out to be a genuinely atrocious bowler, no matter how much he practiced.
“Woody was horrible,” Farrelly chuckled during a Fast Company oral history of the movie. “He was shockingly bad. Like, he never got better.”
Farrelly revealed that the film – the tale of a washed-up former pro-bowler who mentors an unlikely Amish talent played by Randy Quaid – was shot for ten weeks in multiple bowling alleys. Between shots, the cast and crew would have matches for fun just to see how good they could get, and everybody showed improvement. Well, everybody except Harrelson, that is.
“I had a 233 one day,” Farrelly claimed. “I had a 213, a couple of 207s. I mean, we were getting good. Randy Quaid was really good. He could shoot around 200. And I don’t think Woody ever broke 100 the whole time we were bowling.”
The situation got so bad that Bill Murray, who played Harrelson’s arch-nemesis in the film, consistently showed him up. In the movie’s finale, Murray’s character bowls three strikes in a row at a million-dollar tournament, and Murray aced those shots for real. There were 1,000 extras in Reno’s National Bowling Centre that day, and the Farrellys were worried they’d lose interest if it took Murray the 12-15 attempts they expected to hit three strikes.
Instead, according to Peter, “Bill gets up there: first one, strike. Everybody goes nuts. Second one, strike, the place goes crazy. Third one, strike. Three in a row. They were really blown away. Like, Bill just threw three strikes in a row when he had to, and they erupted. It was not fake at all.”
On the other hand, Harrelson showed so little improvement, even when the production assigned him a special coach, that a stand-in had to be used for his big shots. Maybe the poor guy should have stuck to basketball!
