Published in the February 2012 issue
Woody Harrelson peers out from beneath the safe recesses of his knit cap, which is drawn down comically low on his face for warmth and anonymity, creating a Christo-esque tunnel of ribbed fabric. (Would you be surprised to know it's made of hemp?) His enormous cornflower-blue eyes are installed like headlights in the recesses of his affable face — one focused intensely ahead, on the double yellow lines of the moment; the other dialed slightly askew, as if seeking an alternate route.
We are sitting on the outside patio of one of Harrelson's favorite places, an upscale raw-foods restaurant in Santa Monica, where he's been greeted like a returning prince. Buses fume, headed toward the famous pier. A heat lamp burns petrochemicals; in a few minutes he will ask that it be turned off. A feast of small delicacies, prepared by his pal the owner, continues to visit the table in the willowy fingers of the self-described radical vegan yogini "schmactress" who is serving us — pumpkin tortellini, cheesy endives, buckwheat-and-avocado finger sandwiches, Thai herb soup, spring rolls with no-peanut sauce, samosas with a cashew-coconut-based wrapper...
"I was on a bus and some girl sees me blowing my nose," Harrelson is saying of his early years trying to make it as an actor in New York. "I had acne all over my face, which I'd had for years and years. And she's like: 'Hey, you're lactose intolerant. If you quit dairy, all these symptoms you got will be gone in three days.' I was like twenty-four. And I was like, No way. But three days later: gone.
"So I started thinking to myself, Jeez, I've always been told nothing but 'Milk does a body good.' It's a fundamental thing. So from there it was like, What else are they lying about? I just started realizing: There are all these things we're brought up to believe that are just a total hoax, just bullshit advertising, you know?"
From his first appearance, in 1985, on the fourth season of Cheers, we have embraced and followed — face it, we've loved — Woody Harrelson.
With White Men Can't Jump, we learned to respect his game — he has decent handles and can shoot the trey. With Indecent Proposal, we watched him answer the ultimate married-guy hypothetical when he agrees to sell one night with his wife — a sizzling young Demi Moore (with whom he won an MTV Movie Award for best screen kiss) — to Robert Redford for a million bucks. With Oliver Stone's shockingly self-indulgent and violent Natural Born Killers, we started to see Harrelson in a different light. Clearly he had a deep, untapped pocket of ... something really scary.
He'd garner Academy Award, Screen Actors Guild, and Golden Globe nominations for best actor for his title role in The People vs. Larry Flynt, playing the founder of Hustler on a perverse mission to save the First Amendment. (Courtney Love played the doomed wife, Althea, a classic piece of typecasting not to be missed. "She was amazing," Harrelson says. "As an actor, she probably taught me more than almost anybody.")
Last fall, Harrelson teamed again with Israeli filmmaker Oren Moverman, a former journalist who in 2009 directed Harrelson's Oscar-nominated turn (Best Supporting Actor) as a brittle Army casualty-notification officer in The Messenger. Harrelson's performance in Rampart — as a disintegrating L. A. beat cop (and father of two daughters by a pair of sisters, played by Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon) — is muscular and nuanced and has received some of the best reviews of his career; many say it's Oscar-worthy. Think Leaving Las Vegas meets Bad Lieutenant meets Big Love.
Over a career spanning twenty-five years — and a memorable range of roles in a wide variety of other films, including Kingpin, Wag the Dog, No Country for Old Men, Seven Pounds, and Zombieland — Harrelson has become an enduring and faithful box-office draw, the dopey middle brother who somehow made it big.
He has talent and range, he is rich and famous, yet he also seems approachable and unaffected, a good-time family man with three daughters and a wife he's been with for a quarter century, his former assistant. (It is his second marriage. In his mid-twenties, on vacation in Mexico, he married the daughter of the playwright Neil Simon on a lark; they returned the next day to divorce, only to find the place closed.)
In sum, he seems like, and is, a dude who'd be great to chill with — shoot some hoops, smoke some pot, order up a burger and a beer.
Only one problem: Harrelson doesn't eat burgers. He doesn't do most things the way we do them.
In fact, we might all love him, but he doesn't love much about us.
Not at all.
Woody Harrelson is a raw vegan and eco-radical, a close friend of Julia Butterfly Hill, that grrl who lived in the tree. He's gotten himself arrested demonstrating and planting hemp seeds. He prefers to ride only in energy-efficient cars. If the air-conditioning is on, he'll ask you to turn it off. "You know how hard it is to be in Austin, Texas, in July and not be exposed to perpetual AC?" It seems like everywhere he looks, somebody is running a leaf blower, "chasing around one fucking leaf for five minutes ... only to have the neighbor's gardener blow it back into their yard the next day."
He doesn't eat sugar or flour. He doesn't eat dairy. He doesn't consume meat. He looks more like thirty-nine than fifty. He does consume marijuana, but preferably via a vaporizer, which is said to be healthier but kind of lacks the same punch as smoking. He lives with his family on a working organic farm on Maui — biodiesel tractor, five different kinds of avocado trees, tons of coconuts. When his eldest daughter turned four, after more than two years of agitation, she was allowed to sample chicken for the first time. Harrelson lobbied for a total experience, including a backyard slaughter. Mom opted for store-bought. "Tastes just like tofu," his daughter concluded.
Everywhere he goes in public is a bit of a challenge, but not for the usual reasons. People wave like they know him, but they tend to leave him alone. It's the chemicals that stalk him. "The ever-present cleansers, which are a thousand times more toxic than anything they purport to be cleaning." He doesn't wear clothes made of synthetic materials or cleaned at conventional cleaners. "Even sleeping on sheets in hotels washed with all these detergents — I mean, I literally get nauseous." Not to mention the electromagnetic waves — he refuses to talk on a cell phone or even to hold it in his hand. He keeps it off when it's in his pocket "to protect the proverbials."
And his politics. Corporate welfare is the bogeyman. We could cut the deficit in half by cutting all the subsidies the government gives to the coal, nuclear, petroleum, and pharmaceutical industries — he calls them the Beast. "They're raping the environment on a daily basis, getting tax breaks, and making huge profits," he says.
"I love the whole Wall Street — occupation thing because it's a focus on what is really the most fucked-up thing about our society," he says. "Because we're no longer exporting democracy, we're exporting capitalism. And whenever we fight a war, it's not for democracy; it's for capitalism. Everybody knows these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are all about oil." And meanwhile, sons and daughters in the military are being killed every day, dying for the American ideal that they're told they're fighting for. "They join because they're patriotic. They're getting paid jack-all to go out there and put their lives on the line."
Harrelson's mother was deeply religious. His father, Charles Voyde Harrelson, was an encyclopedia salesman and an armed robber who claimed to have participated in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He was sentenced to two life terms in connection with the 1979 assassination of U. S. district judge John H. Wood. In 1995, he tried to escape from the Atlanta penitentiary using a homemade ladder but didn't get far. In 1998, Woody led an unsuccessful effort to secure a new trial for his father, who claimed that evidence had been suppressed in his first trial. He died in his sleep in his cell in 2007 in a supermax prison in Colorado. Google him. There's a mug shot from 1960. The resemblance is uncanny — Woody circa White Men. "I look at him as someone who could be a friend more than someone who was a father," Harrelson has said.
There is a quote from Carl Jung that Harrelson likes: "Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is."
Seems about right.
Harrelson takes a pull on his maca-mint smoothie with double cacao powder, which is smooth but also chewy.
"Don't get me wrong," he is saying. "I like to party. I say that without shame. I'll go on cooked-food benders and just be, like, drinking and eating grade-A shit for a couple of weeks. Like I just went to Europe for three weeks to promote the movie. It's hard to find raw food there. And then I came to New York and got really serious."
I guess when you're all pure and you have a couple of drinks —
"No, a couple of drinks ain't that big a deal. It's having, you know, five drinks plus shots, that kind of stuff. That's a big deal. I got right on the verge of being sick. Like I was really ready to jump off into the abyss. I was just crawling to the finish line. It's like that Joseph Campbell book, Hero with a Thousand Faces I think it was. He's like, you reach this point — and I'm paraphrasing badly — but you get to this point where you realize your modes of doing things no longer fit for you. I don't mind being Party Boy Henderson, you know what I mean? But there just has to be an appropriate balance."
So it's kind of a battle for you? Is that why you live in Hawaii? Escape from temptation?
He shrugs, abashed. Not a man given to moderation. "It was like, when I left home for college, I went straight from religion into hedonism. Hopefully I'll never be as extreme as I was, but sometimes I think I have pushed it pretty hard. On the other hand, I do fasts and things to clean and purify. I detox before I retox."
Okay, maybe he's a little more like us than we thought.
A little later, thoroughly stuffed and burping wheatgrass shots, we are hanging out in the garage behind the restaurant. Organic, artisanal, outdoor-grown marijuana from the storied hillsides of Humboldt County is being sampled. We shake hands with the car's owner. There is a vaporizer plugged into the 110-volt outlet installed in the vehicle — the reason he bought the car, he gleefully shares. Los Angeles can be a wonderfully indulgent place.
We take turns saying stuff and laughing and sucking THC vapors through a long plastic tube, which is fitted on the other end with a glass bowl that connects to a glowing glass rod inside a wooden box that looks homemade. Then we all hear a screeching noise — a heavy fire door opening.
Alarmed, everyone freezes.
Through the door appears ... the illusionist David Blaine. At his side is another willowy yogini — later she will reveal her allergy to glutens.
Harrelson greets Blaine with a bear hug. He seems a lot less thin than the last time I saw him this close, when he was encased in a block of ice in New York City.
Blaine immediately whips out a deck of cards. At first I think this makes him an asshole. Then I start to realize: Maybe he's just shy. Why else does someone learn sleight of hand in the first place?
He asks me to eyeball a card as he riffles the deck. I do. He talks for a minute or so in a distracting manner. Twice he jokes he's not going to steal my watch. And then the very card I chose with my mind, the ten of diamonds, ends up folded like a piece of origami between my wrist and my watch. I never even felt him put it there!
Harrelson laughs at my amazement — "I told you I had a great surprise for you," he says happily. In a town of porcelain horse teeth, it seems somehow a character statement that he continues to sport his snaggle-toothed smile — a collection of bright white Chiclets from the reject bin, all of them chipped and unmatched, widely set.
After a bit, we walk back en masse through the restaurant, so full of exotic smells. Near the door, we encounter the restaurant's owner, Juliano. He is sitting on a barstool, chatting up the most adorable young Asian girl you've ever seen — the face of a geisha without the makeup, dressed in form-hugging yoga clothes. He introduces her to his good buddies, the superfamous Harrelson and Blaine.
An awkward silence ensues.
Not even a glimmer of recognition.
"She's fresh in town," Juliano says. "She wants to be an actress. Do you have any advice for her, Woody?"
Harrelson throws back his head and issues an amused laugh — the snaggled teeth, the halogen-blue eyes goggled inside the Christo-cave of his knitted hemp cap.
Then he gets serious. He wags a professorial finger toward the girl.
"Don't ever leave your wallet in the dressing room," he says.
And then he's off into the gathering darkness with his illusionist friend and his gluten-free assistant.
Harrelson takes a pull on his maca-mint smoothie with double cacao powder, which is smooth but also chewy.
"Don't get me wrong," he is saying. "I like to party. I say that without shame. I'll go on cooked-food benders and just be, like, drinking and eating grade-A shit for a couple of weeks. Like I just went to Europe for three weeks to promote the movie. It's hard to find raw food there. And then I came to New York and got really serious."
I guess when you're all pure and you have a couple of drinks —
"No, a couple of drinks ain't that big a deal. It's having, you know, five drinks plus shots, that kind of stuff. That's a big deal. I got right on the verge of being sick. Like I was really ready to jump off into the abyss. I was just crawling to the finish line. It's like that Joseph Campbell book, Hero with a Thousand Faces I think it was. He's like, you reach this point — and I'm paraphrasing badly — but you get to this point where you realize your modes of doing things no longer fit for you. I don't mind being Party Boy Henderson, you know what I mean? But there just has to be an appropriate balance."
So it's kind of a battle for you? Is that why you live in Hawaii? Escape from temptation?
He shrugs, abashed. Not a man given to moderation. "It was like, when I left home for college, I went straight from religion into hedonism. Hopefully I'll never be as extreme as I was, but sometimes I think I have pushed it pretty hard. On the other hand, I do fasts and things to clean and purify. I detox before I retox."
Okay, maybe he's a little more like us than we thought.
A little later, thoroughly stuffed and burping wheatgrass shots, we are hanging out in the garage behind the restaurant. Organic, artisanal, outdoor-grown marijuana from the storied hillsides of Humboldt County is being sampled. We shake hands with the car's owner. There is a vaporizer plugged into the 110-volt outlet installed in the vehicle — the reason he bought the car, he gleefully shares. Los Angeles can be a wonderfully indulgent place.
We take turns saying stuff and laughing and sucking THC vapors through a long plastic tube, which is fitted on the other end with a glass bowl that connects to a glowing glass rod inside a wooden box that looks homemade. Then we all hear a screeching noise — a heavy fire door opening.
Alarmed, everyone freezes.
Through the door appears ... the illusionist David Blaine. At his side is another willowy yogini — later she will reveal her allergy to glutens.
Harrelson greets Blaine with a bear hug. He seems a lot less thin than the last time I saw him this close, when he was encased in a block of ice in New York City.
Blaine immediately whips out a deck of cards. At first I think this makes him an asshole. Then I start to realize: Maybe he's just shy. Why else does someone learn sleight of hand in the first place?
He asks me to eyeball a card as he riffles the deck. I do. He talks for a minute or so in a distracting manner. Twice he jokes he's not going to steal my watch. And then the very card I chose with my mind, the ten of diamonds, ends up folded like a piece of origami between my wrist and my watch. I never even felt him put it there!
Harrelson laughs at my amazement — "I told you I had a great surprise for you," he says happily. In a town of porcelain horse teeth, it seems somehow a character statement that he continues to sport his snaggle-toothed smile — a collection of bright white Chiclets from the reject bin, all of them chipped and unmatched, widely set.
After a bit, we walk back en masse through the restaurant, so full of exotic smells. Near the door, we encounter the restaurant's owner, Juliano. He is sitting on a barstool, chatting up the most adorable young Asian girl you've ever seen — the face of a geisha without the makeup, dressed in form-hugging yoga clothes. He introduces her to his good buddies, the superfamous Harrelson and Blaine.
An awkward silence ensues.
Not even a glimmer of recognition.
"She's fresh in town," Juliano says. "She wants to be an actress. Do you have any advice for her, Woody?"
Harrelson throws back his head and issues an amused laugh — the snaggled teeth, the halogen-blue eyes goggled inside the Christo-cave of his knitted hemp cap.
Then he gets serious. He wags a professorial finger toward the girl.
"Don't ever leave your wallet in the dressing room," he says.
And then he's off into the gathering darkness with his illusionist friend and his gluten-free assistant.
More Words and Wisdom from Woody Harrelson
