“I want to tear my head off”: the performance Woody Harrelson regrets the most
Early into his career, Woody Harrelson thought he was going to be eternally doomed to his bartender Woody Boyd character in the NBC sitcom Cheers. However, eventually, Harrelson managed to escape from the role and establish himself as a serious actor, becoming one of the best of his generation in the process.
Beginning with his effort in Milos Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt, Harrelson’s career took off into stardom with an Academy Award nomination, and before long, he started appearing in the movies he had always wanted to, including Natural Born Killers, The Thin Red Line and No Country for Old Men.
With The Messenger and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri also bringing in Oscar nods, and Zombieland, Seven Psychopaths and a TV effort in True Detective earning Harrelson acclaim, it’s easy to see why he’s go revered. However, even the greatest actors have career regrets, and in that light, Harrelson is no different.
Speaking with The New York Times, Harrelson once spoke of looking back at his least favourite performances. “When things are going right, I don’t feel rigid,” he said. “But there are performances where I was like, ‘Why couldn’t I just get outside whatever I was doing?’ Ten years later, I’ll think of something I should have done in a scene, and I want to tear my head off.”
And pull his head off Harrelson did when he reflected on his effort in the 2017 science fiction action film War for the Planet of the Apes, the third part of the Planet of the Apes reboot series. Taking place two years after Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, directed by Matt Reeves, the film tells of the ongoing conflict between apes and humans and the breakout of a full-on war.
Andy Serkis once again played Caesar, the leader of the enhanced ape tribe, while Harrelson played Colonel J. Wesley McCullough, the leader of the Alpha-Omega paramilitary faction, the last bastion of humankind. Harrelson found some issues with the film’s production, though, noting, “Planet of the Apes — that’s one of those times where there was so much technology involved in what we were doing, I was a little daunted.”
Looking back on his effort, Harrelson feels that he would be able to “do it 20 times better.” He explained further, “There’s several roles that I go back and think: ‘Why didn’t I try this? Why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I step into a whole ‘nother character?’ But it’s probably best to let those things drop. They can haunt you.”
Indeed, there’s a problem for an actor where they can only give their best to a given performance at the moment and then can only reflect on it after the fact, once the film has been released. However, as Harrelson states, it’s also better for an actor to try and relinquish the stress of worrying about how they might have made a performance better.
Harrelson has starred in so many movies and has drawn widespread acclaim for many of his performances. Sure, he might consider his effort in War for the Planet of the Apes to be amongst his worst performances, but for every bad portrayal in his filmography, there are several brilliant moments, as proven by his incredible cultural status and three Academy Award nominations.
