Having A Father Who Was a Killer Follows Woody Harrelson
Woody Harrelson
I'm not looking forward to meeting Woody Harrelson. I'm a bit scared, to be honest. I've just seen Rampart, his new movie in which he plays a racist, psychopathic police officer. Harrelson is terrifying in it. Terrifying when he's chasing villains, bullying juniors, beating the crap out of innocents, stalking the mothers of his children. He's even terrifying when he's making love. His body, specially slimmed-down and muscled-up for the part, pulses with a tension permanently on the cusp of violence.
It's not as if this is a one-off – there's his sickening Mickey Knox in Natural Born Killers("At birth, I was cast into a flaming pit of scum"), deranged killer Tallahassee inZombieland, Charlie in the forthcoming Seven Psychopaths whose title says it all, and we've barely started. Even when he plays it nice, like he did in Cheers all those years ago as dopey bartender Woody, there's something in the goofy smile that makes you worry – for his sanity, and your safety. And it's not as if the weird stuff is just confined to acting – there are numerous stories of him hitting photographers or police officers or taxi doors.
Charles V Harrelson was jailed in 1973 for the murder of grain dealer Sam Degelia Jr. He was sentenced to 15 years, but released after five for good behaviour. In 1981 he was given two life sentences for the assassination of district judge John H Wood – the first murder of an American judge in the 20th century. At times, he also claimed to have assassinated John F Kennedy.
It was in 1981, after he heard his father had been arrested for killing the judge, that Woody tried to get in touch with him, aged 20. Were they ever reconciled? "Oh yeah, oh yeah. I tried for years to get him out. To get him a new trial." Why did you think he deserved a new trial? Harrelson stops, and thinks about it as if for the first time. "I don't know he did deserve a new trial… just being a son trying to help his dad. Then I spent a couple of million beating my head against the wall." A couple of million, I say, astonished. "Easily. Lawyers upon lawyers…"
Do you see much of your father in you? "Quite a bit… I was born on his birthday. They have a thing in Japan where they say if you're born on your father's birthday, you're not like your father, you are your father, and it's so weird when I would sit and talk with him. It was just mind-blowing to see all the things he did just like me." Such as? "Idiosyncratic things. The way he laughed. The face, very similar."
Did it scare you that you were so similar? "No, no." He laughs, uncertainly.
Charles V Harrelson died in prison in 2007. Were they friends by then? "Yeah, we got along pretty good. When you can't hang out and go to a pub, you know what I mean, it's hard."
Doesn't it take a lot out of him making a film like that (Rampant)
– after all, he's in virtually every scene, inflicting damage of one sort or another? "It was an intense time," he says. "The problem was being seeped in paranoia because that was so much the attitude of the character. That really affected me because I don't normally do paranoia." He pauses. "Well, sometimes, of course. But it's an emotion I try not to affect myself with. I had weird shit happening." What weird shit? "Not stuff I'd care to talk about. But being aggressive and strange with friends who had not been offensive, but I took it as offensive. 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.' "
What messed with his head more, Rampart or Natural Born Killers? The latter film, directed by Oliver Stone, was blamed for a series of copycat killings after it was released in 1994. "I'd say this, but then when I was doing Natural Born Killers I was doing some weird shit, too." I tell him I can't bear watching it; that it freaks me out. He smiles. "Really, it's a misunderstood romantic comedy." And now his smile is truly worrying. "It's a dark comedy." Pah. I tell him I reckon Natural Born Killers features more Hollywood headcases than any film made – Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr, Tom Sizemore, Tommy Lee Jones, Juliette Lewis. "I know, it was a mad little time. After we'd been working on it for a while, I felt I was the sanest guy in it. I really did. This has never happened… I'm the sanest guy in the whole deal." He whoops at the very idea. Who was the most insane? "Tom and Juliette went a little crazy. Yeah. I felt in a way Oliver encouraged madness. He needed to create that mayhem because that's what was on the screen."
Harrelson, 50, is one of Hollywood's most interesting actors. It's not only the roles he plays (he has often worked outside the mainstream with directors such as Michael Winterbottom in Welcome To Sarajevo andMilos Forman in The People Vs Larry Flynt) and the way he plays them, it's his whole backstory – disturbing family history, sexcapades of youth, militant veganism, political campaigning (not all of it for the legalisation of marijuana). It's the multiple contradictions and what-ifs that make him fascinating.
He could, for instance, easily have ended up as a minister of the church. His mother is a religious prestbyterian and so was he through his childhood. Did he see it as a calling? "I did a little bit." He studied theology alongside drama at university, and it was only then that his belief system started to collapse. "I remember Dr Matthews; a great teacher teaching progressive ideas. I started seeing through the way the Bible got constructed. For example, there were two angels outside the tomb when Jesus rolled back the stone and rose from the dead. Why? Because in Jewish law there had to be two witnesses for it to be legal. But when it was first written it was one, so little things like that."
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