The role that triggered Woody Harrelson’s real-life paranoia: “That really affected me”
It’s not unusual for actors to lose themselves in a role, especially if it happens to be an emotionally intense role or a powerful personality. For some, this can mean a character imparting a kind of wisdom upon them, but for others, it can be more worrisome. Many even attribute some actors’ demise or downward spiral to roles they’ve played, such as Heath Ledger’s death often being linked to his portrayal of the Joker.
However, one actor who seems like he would be above this kind of intense dedication to a role is Woody Harrelson. Not to say he’s not a dedicated actor, the man is critically and commercially acclaimed and beloved. But he just seems to be beyond the drama of it all, perhaps due to his dedication to the legalisation of weed and too cool for school attitude.
However, Harrelson’s role as disgraced police officer Dave Brown in crime drama Rampart seems to prove otherwise. Dave Brown is an intense character, a racist, misogynistic officer facing up to the mistakes he’s made in his career after the fallout from the Rampart Scandal of the late 1990s. Brown spends a large portion of the film chasing villains, beating innocents, bullying juniors and stalking the mothers of his children.
When asked if intense roles like Dave Brown take a lot out of him, he admits they can. “It was an intense time, the problem was being seeped in paranoia because that was so much the attitude of the character. That really affected me,” he explained. But this wasn’t because it was close to home for Harrelson. In fact, the paranoia was so far removed from what Harrelson usually allows himself to feel, that it had a crippling impact on his typically sunny psyche. “I don’t normally do paranoia… It’s an emotion I try not to affect myself with,” the star said.
While he exudes a cool guy personality frequently, Harrelson has been known to give into intense emotions before, whether it’s punching a paparazzo in the face or getting into a police chase around London. But he seems pretty self-aware, discussing the effects of the paranoid character of Dave Brown on his own life, “I had weird shit happening… being aggressive and strange with friends who had not been offensive.”
And it’s not the first time the actor has felt affected by a dark character. ‘Weird shit’ happened around the time of Natural Born Killers, too. And it’s not surprising that Harrelson finds it so easy to slip into these characters, given his father’s occupation as a contracted killer. The actor has had a real proximity to the darker side of life, which surely allowed him to embody dark characters so well – maybe a little too well.
“A couple of friends said, ‘I can’t wait till you’re done with this role, because I know this ain’t you doing it’,“ he explained further. It must be a relief to be able to shed a character who has been so intense, especially when the people around you start to feel the effects of it. It’s unsurprising then that the job of acting attracts the intensity of personalities that it does because it takes a certain kind of person to be able to embody such intense emotions and then let them go when the job is done.
