The plot Woody Harrelson didn’t understand: “I honestly had no idea what the hell was going on”
At one point, Woody Harrelson thought that his professional acting career was going to begin and end with his effort in the NBC sitcom Cheers. However, after leaving the role in the early 1990s, Harrelson finally got his first breakthroughs in the movie industry, including those in White Men Can’t Jump and Natural Born Killers.
From there, the Texas-born actor never looked back and established himself as a vital piece in the wider Hollywood puzzle. In the following years, Harrelson delivered many fine performances in the likes of The People vs. Larry Flynt and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, both of which he earned an Academy Award nomination for.
Looking back on Harrelson’s career in more detail, though, it appears that he’s often starred in a number of productions that have rather complex narratives. For instance, True Detective is certainly a work that keeps you guessing, while Seven Psychopaths also has its fair share of twists and turns.
However, they paled in terms of their complexity, at least for Harrelson himself, when it came to his understanding of Richard Linklater’s 2006 science fiction adult animated thriller movie A Scanner Darkly, based on the 1977 novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick and starred the likes of Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder.
Like many of Dick’s greatest works, A Scanner Darkly tells of a near-future dystopian world in which society’s privacy and identity are constantly threatened by high-tech police surveillance at the same time that a drug addiction epidemic has swept the United States after losing the war on drugs.
In preparing to take on the role of Ernie Luckman, one of the drug-addicted housemates of Keanu Reeves’ undercover agent Bob Arctor, Harrelson set about reading Dick’s novel but found that it was difficult to understand its narrative and themes, as revealed in an interview with Moviehole.
“It was very interesting. I read that book, and I honestly had no idea what the hell was going on,” Harrelson admitted before pointing out that he took on the role of Luckman so he could work with Linklater, Reeves, Downey Jr and Ryder.
However, he also added, “I wanted to do it, but I really still don’t know what the hell that film is about. But I just know it’s really interesting.”
Evidently, the bizarre quality of Dick’s novel was utterly lost on Harrelson, and things did not become any more clear to the actor once he had completed the film adaptation with Linklater. Compared to the movie versions of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Minority Report, perhaps A Scanner Darkly is the most confusing of the Dick adaptations, particularly concerning its hallucinatory visual qualities and drug addiction thematic labyrinth.
While Harrelson admittedly struggled with the story of A Scanner Darkly, he was blown away by Linklater’s rotoscoped animation style and the performance of Robert Downey Jr. He said of the latter, “He really is a genius. One time we did this scene where the four of us are all around in the living room, talking about this bike, and Downey just went off on this great tirade. And then Rick cut, and me and Winona just looked at each other and she says, ‘I am so glad we got to see that.’ And I said, ‘Me too. That was amazing.’”
