Woody Harrelson’s four conditions for making ‘Zombieland’: “The first two were reasonable”
If you ask most people who the most versatile actor working in Hollywood today is, chances are they’re probably not going to answer “Woody Harrelson”. But if you think about it closely and look at the evidence, the reality is that Woody has to be up there in the conversation.
He’s been producing work of the utmost quality for four decades now, starting off with his Emmy award-winning bartender role in Cheers before wildly pivoting to a steamy showing in Robert Redford’s smash Indecent Proposal, and then the lead in the Quentin Tarantino-written, Oliver Stone-directed Natural Born Killers in 1994. A film so controversial, it looked like it would be banned outright in the UK for some time, mostly due to its graphic violence.
Ever since, Harrelson has gone on to appear in some fantastic features, quietly amassing a body of work that ranks alongside the best of them. His hitlist is impressive to say the least: White Men Can’t Jump, No Country For Old Men, The Thin Red Line, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. And amidst it all, he appeared in that magnificent first season of HBO’s True Detective alongside Matthew McConaughey, a show that underlined his acting chops and earned him several nominations for major awards.
Harrelson has also shown he can tread the boards with the best of them, doing theatre in the UK in 2005 and directing a play he wrote in Toronto in 2011. Aside from drama, he demonstrated a lighter touch with some brilliant comedies, including the hilarious Farrelly brothers bowling movie Kingpin in 1996 and the 2009 road trip-survival hit Zombieland, a movie which he initially was slightly unsure about taking on.
Starring Jesse Eisenberg and Emma Stone, the film is an adventure across a post-apocalyptic zombie-ridden America, and proved a big hit on release against a relatively modest budget. It was Venom director Ruben Fleischer’s first film, perhaps an influence in Harrelson making sure conditions were to his liking before signing on.
While he apparently liked the first-time director and the script, Harrelson insisted on four things being in place. Fleischer explained: “The first two were fairly reasonable about casting and crew. The third was that we have an environmentally conscious set. And the fourth was that I don’t eat dairy for a week.”
Luckily, that didn’t cause Fleischer any fears about casting the Texan for the movie, saying, “There’s something about the way he talks that is funny. I wanted the character to be iconic and bigger than a typical zombie movie might have. He has all the qualities required of a bad-ass, zombie-killing, loner-drifter weirdo.”
Harrelson also had plenty of other input for the movie, including thoughts on the wardrobe for his character, Tallahassee. “I never worked so long and hard on an outfit in my life,” he said. “What this guy wears is who he is. You want to get a sense of this guy as soon as you see him. So I pick out the necklaces, the sunglasses. But the hat? The minute you see that on Tallahassee, you buy him. He’s real. And he’s got a real cool hat.”
Zombieland ended up making five times its budget worldwide and spawned a sequel, Zombieland: Double Tap, some ten years later, a film which reunited the cast, writers and director. Again, it did well at the box office, albeit to slightly more mixed reviews than the first instalment.
And Fleischer ended up almost sticking to his promise not to eat dairy, revealing: “For me, to not eat cheese is like for an alcoholic not to drink. I had a hard time, especially since it was Memorial Day when he asked me, and there were all the summer barbecues. But I ended up being a vegetarian for 11 months as a result.” Fortunately, the abstinence paid off in spades.
