The performance Woody Harrelson will always regret: “I didn’t feel like I really pulled it off”
Woody Harrelson is a fascinating interview subject. He’s starred in all kinds of movies in his four-decade career and played a myriad of characters with different personalities, outlooks, and dispositions.
Of course, Harrelson doesn’t have a dishonest bone in his body, so he’s always prone to making admissions other actors might keep close to their vests. For example, if he’s asked about a particular role and he thinks he botched it, he’ll ’fess up. That’s precisely what he did when questioned about an intense part he played in a star-studded 2007 political thriller, confessing he believes he failed to bring any real depth to the character.
The story of this performance that Harrelson will always regret goes back to the early 2000s, a time when Irish actor Stuart Townsend was making waves in Hollywood. After starring as the vampire Lestat in Queen of the Damned in 2002, Townsend appeared in blockbusters like Æon Flux and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as well as smaller movies like Chaos Theory and The Best Man. During that period, though, he was probably best known for his relationship with Charlize Theron, who he met on the set of 2002’s Trapped.
By 2007, Townsend had amassed enough cache in the industry that he was able to secure financing for his directorial debut, Battle in Seattle. The movie, which combined traditional moviemaking, montages, and documentary footage of the real-life protests that inspired it, was based on an infamous incident at the 1999 World Trade Organisation Ministerial Conference. Thousands of activists descended on the building in Seattle, Washington, and tensions were extremely high. The situation soon escalated into a state of emergency, with protesters pitting against the Seattle Police Department and the Washington National Guard.
Townsend pulled together a truly stacked cast for the movie, including Ray Liotta, Channing Tatum, Michelle Rodriguez, Jennifer Carpenter, and Outkast’s André Benjamin. However, he centred much of the movie on a riot policeman, played by Harrelson, whose pregnant girlfriend, Theron, is accidentally caught up in the violent protests.
To Harrelson’s frustration, though, he struggled to get into the mindset of a police officer. As a man with a liberal attitude to marijuana and a longstanding distrust of authority, it was difficult for him to connect to the role – and he wound up deeply unhappy with his performance. “I didn’t feel like I really pulled it off in Battle in Seattle,” he admitted to Coming Soon, “Or that I really got any kind of depth with it.”
In fact, Harrelson felt his performance in the film was such a non-entity that, when he played a police officer again in 2011’s Rampart, he confessed, “It was almost like playing a cop for the first time. It was a little bit of a daunting thing to take on.”
This time, the beloved star did more research into the realities of being an LAPD member, and this helped him connect more on a personal level. “Riding around with those cops was the most helpful thing of all, I think,” he explained. “I really came to respect those guys. I really had an issue of believability, I guess.” At his core, Harrelson simply couldn’t seen himself as a cop, and his brain kept rejecting the idea, so it helped him immeasurably to “hang with those guys and start to respect them and see the humanity in them. That helped my whole process a lot.”
Fascinatingly, immersing himself in the often contradictory world of modern policing also helped him understand the mentality behind riot police tasked with quelling dissent and managing large groups of angry people. “These cops,” he mused, “They don’t dictate policy. Certainly they have some leeway as to how they do it, but when you’re told to clear that whole area—that’s a frickin’ tough task.”
To him, the blame for horrible incidents like the 1999 riots lies with the institutions giving the police these orders, not the rank-and-file officers themselves. “I’m not trying to excuse,” he clarified. “Some cops are assholes. But by and large, cops are pretty cool.”
