“He was the enemy”: The lead role in ‘LBJ’ that forced Woody Harrelson to overcome a lifelong hatred
Being an actor often means having to confront different areas of your life that, for the most part, remain dormant. Sometimes, this is working on yourself to acknowledge your foibles or perhaps digging into a well of your own childhood memories. The very art of expressing somebody else’s emotions means that you, as a performer, need to be attuned with your own. That’s something Woody Harrelson had to overcome for one notable role.
Harrelson’s rise to fame began with a bang as he became a welcomed addition to America’s most beloved sitcom, Cheers. The somewhat dunderheaded Woody Boyd, Harrelson became a cult icon and would soon embark on an incredibly robust movie career.
Harrelson has been able to dabble in both roles that showcase his own style as well as rely on his abilities as an actor. For every performance in movies like Zombieland, which see his natural charm exude through his portrayal, there is the cultish vision of Captain Thomas Smith in 2022’s A Triangle of Sadness. Add to this roles in classic movies like Seven Psychopaths, Natural Born Killers, No Country for Old Men and, lest we forget, White Men Can’t Jump, and Harrelson’s career as a performer stacks up against any others.
In a few of those roles Harrelson has had to face up to aspects of his life he would rather turn away from. Notably, in Natural Born Killers, in which Harrelson plays a maniacal killer, the actor had to face the life of his hitman father, Charles Voyde Harrelson. In a different way, another role would see Harrelson confront aspects of his emotional spectrum that he would have rather ignored.
Taking on the portrayal of a real-life person is always difficult, but when it is the controversial figure of former president Lyndon B Johnson, it is near-impossible. And so it proved for Harrelson. LBJ, as he was known, was the successor to John F Kennedy following the latter’s assassination and was more particularly well known for his insistence on America’s continuation of the Vietnam war and the draft that it necessitated.
For Harrelson, playing the president in LBJ was a supremely difficult task: “My vantage point—my view of LBJ—was quite tainted by the Vietnam War. I hated LBJ. He was the enemy.” A noted left-leaning figure, Harrelson was up in arms when faced with playing the political heavyweight. But, things turned after a little advice and reading a particular book.
“A friend of mine named Rob Moran—a great friend of mine, we were roommates years ago when I first moved to New York and was trying to break into acting—he’s a producer and he was trying to convince me to play LBJ. ‘You’ve got to play LBJ. You’re made to play LBJ.’ But I told him, “’I can’t play LBJ because I don’t like him,'” explained Harrelson.
“But he insisted,” Harrelson continued, “and finally he said, ‘Just read this book.’ And I thought, ‘Well, you know, he’s kind of an interesting guy.’ And then Rob [Reiner] asked me to play LBJ not long after that, and I just thought, ‘Holy shit. The universe is speaking to me. Now I’ve really got to give this some serious consideration.’ Especially because I wanted to work with Rob.”
The role in the 2017 movie would become a signature moment in Harrelson’s career and mark him out as one of the more accomplished actors of his class. While there are likely a plethora of reason as to why it worked so well, one of them is that Harrelson had to square up to the hatred he once held for the man he played.
