Woody Harrelson names his favourite Woody Harrelson movies: “I’m just talking about the quality of the film”
Having apparently made it his mission to appear in as many different kinds of movies as possible, the filmography of Woody Harrelson has become a smorgasbord of virtually everything cinema has to offer.
He’s played a comic book villain in Venom: Let There Be Carnage, succumbed to conspiracy theories in Roland Emmerich’s 2012, battled an undead uprising in the Zombieland double bill, lent a sympathetic dystopian ear in The Hunger Games, and failed to resist a simian coup as the villain of War for the Planet of the Apes, and those are just the blockbusters.
Harrelson has three Academy Award nominations to his name and has spent the last 30 years deftly weaving between genres to ensure he’s always trying his hand at something different. He can do drama, he can do comedy, he’s done action, sci-fi, fantasy, and anything anyone can shake a stick at, but what are his favourite features from such an eclectic back catalogue?
It’s a tough question and one that offers plenty of food for thought. After all, he’s been in No Country for Old Men, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Thin Red Line, Triangle of Sadness, and Kingpin to name just a small few, but it’s none of them. It’s an entirely biased assessment, sure, but Harrelson is just as entitled as anyone to pat themselves on the back for several jobs well done.
“Most definitely The People vs Larry Flint, and I love The Messenger, working with Oren. I put them right up there,” he told The Huffington Post. “You can do a movie and hope it may be great, but until you have seen it, you don’t know. I loved Rampart. I love that one called The Hi-Low Country that Steven Frears shot. I thought that was really great.”
He was being completely objective, too, clarifying that his findings were “about the quality of the film” and nothing else. “I would probably put Natural Born Killers up there as one of my favourites,” he added of the controversial thriller. “As that was just great fun to make.”
Harrelson earned a ‘Best Actor’ nod at the Oscars for playing smut baron Larry Flynt, landed on the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ shortlist for Oren Mooverman’s war drama, and even loved his re-teaming with the same director on the corrupt cop thriller despite the finished version of the movie leaving him in a state of borderline depression.
Frears’ modern western is one of the more unheralded pictures Harrelson has starred in that didn’t make much of an impression either critically or commercially, but it evidently made a mark on him. Not everyone will be inclined to agree, but for Harrelson it’s never gotten any better than The People vs Larry Flynt, The Messenger, Rampart, The Hi-Low Country, and Natural Born Killers.
