Woody Harrelson’s trilogy of controversy: “That hurt, you want people to see the movies you do”
Thanks to his affable, easygoing everyman persona and the breakthrough role of his career coming on the long-running and wildly popular sitcom Cheers, Woody Harrelson hardly gave off the impression he was going to become embroiled in regular controversy when he made the leap to the big screen.
It was even less evident when his first hit feature in a starring role was White Men Can’t Jump, a sports comedy that was as entertaining as it was inoffensive. However, Harrelson was wary of becoming pigeonholed in one genre, so he sought to stretch himself as a performer by tackling a number of different roles.
The downside is that several of them found controversy for a number of different reasons, accidentally making him the connectively contentious tissue between them. Within the space of two years, backlash and bad buzz suddenly began following Harrelson everywhere he went.
Oliver Stone’s headline-grabbing Natural Born Killers was the first of the trifecta, with Harrelson’s bemusement over being asked to play such a vicious character quickly dislodged from his mind by the overwhelming negativity that greeted the film’s perceived glorification of violence and anarchy.
The thriller was directly implicated in several real-life crimes, but that wasn’t the end of his bad luck. Reuniting with White Men Can’t Jump co-star Wesley Snipes for action caper Money Train wasn’t controversial on paper, but it became the second Harrelson flick in quick succession to be tied to criminal activity.
“Then there was the whole controversy around Money Train, believe it or not,” he told Flavour. “Because there’s a scene where fuel was injected into the ticket booth in the subway, and lighting it on fire, and then someone did that, and they said it was a copycat thing. So it was like, bam bam bam.”
Last but not least, Harrelson’s Academy Award-nominated performance in the biographical drama The People vs. Larry Flynt once again came under fire, this time following accusations that the movie glorified a violent misogynist. Protests were mounted to decry its painting of its subject in such a positive light.
Describing it as a project in which he was “so invested emotionally,” Harrelson was crushed by the fury being aimed towards it. “Everyone worked so hard on it,” he sighed. “So for Gloria Steinem to go around the country and tell women to make sure they don’t see it and to make sure their husbands don’t see it, that hurt. That hurt. You want people to see the movies you do, you know?”
It was a tough time for Harrelson, and while all three performances were beneficial to his career and long-term prospects in their own way, getting caught in the middle of three separate instances of negativity can’t have been easy to navigate. At the end of the day, he was just an actor doing the job he was paid to do, but playing the lead in all of them made him the common denominator.
