“It’s just over”: The role Woody Harrelson thought ended his career
Long before Woody Harrelson became the recipient of three Academy Award nominations for his work on The People vs. Larry Flynt, The Messenger and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – and gave further notable performances in the likes of White Men Can’t Jump, Natural Born Killers and Seven Psychopaths – he made his breakthrough on the NBC sitcom Cheers.
Harrelson’s portrayal of bartender Woody Boyd perhaps remains the actor’s most important as it served as how he was first introduced to the world. A magnetic performance as the affable yet naïve bartender cemented Harrelson’s position as one of the most lovable faces on home screens across America.
The role is one that most neatly captures Harrelson’s charm. Awkward at times but charming in every moment on screen, Woody Boyd helped to put Harrelson on the map as part of the Hollywood lexicon. With TV commanding millions of live watchers, Harrelson’s name became a permanent fixture on the tip of the nation’s tongue.
Interestingly, even though Cheers provided Harrelson’s leg up into the world of acting, at one point, he felt that he might be stuck in the job for the rest of his life and that he’d never be able to escape the show’s clutches. Harrelson hadn’t even been keen on taking on a television role but decided to audition anyway.
“I was 23, and I kind of had an idea that I didn’t want to do television because I generally didn’t like the quality,” the actor once told The Hollywood Reporter. Still, Harrelson seemed to nail the audition and landed the job, despite him perhaps not wanting to accept it in his heart of hearts.
But things took off, and in a big way. Cheers is now regarded as one of the founding pillars of the modern sitcom, not only spawning a few off-shoots, but launching and cementing a whole run of careers with Harrelson, Ted Danson and Kelsey Grammar to name a few. But things weren’t so sweet all the time for Harrelson and his Hollywood dream almost never got going.
With Harrelson thriving in the role, he felt he’d be able to transition to movie stardom relatively easily. However, this suddenly proved to be more difficult than he’d first anticipated, and even with several years spent making Cheers one of the most recognisable faces on TV, somehow, the Texas-born actor was not the first name on producers’ call sheet.
“Well, for six years during Cheers, I couldn’t get another job,” Harrelson once told MovieHole. “So I was getting to the mindset of, ‘Wow, so this is it. I thought the career was just starting, and apparently it’s just over.’” Thankfully, it wasn’t long before the Hollywood acting icon finally made the jump to film, and he never looked back, always grateful for his start in the business.
He added: “Fortunately then, I got a role in Doc Hollywood, and then White Men Can’t Jump. That was during my hiatus from Cheers, and then I did Indecent Proposal during my last hiatus. And then Indecent Proposal came out literally the day after we wrapped Cheers. And then I started work on Natural Born Killers.”
