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Role Recall: Woody Harrelson on identifying with 'Cheers' character, learning to dunk, and what he really thinks of Jennifer Lawrence
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Over the course of a wildly successful, widely diverse three decades, Woody Harrelson has held down the tap on Cheers, proved white men can jump, and managed to survive The Hunger Games, winning an Emmy and receiving two Oscar nods along the way. The 56-year-old Texas native has two major films out this month — the Rob Reiner-helmed biopic LBJ, in which he’s virtually unrecognizable as the 36th president, and the Oscar-buzzing Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, where he plays a local sheriff under siege from a mother who wants justice for her murdered daughter —  and has recently wrapped filming on 2018’s surefire blockbuster Solo: A Star Wars Story. Yahoo Entertainment recently down with Harrelson for a guided tour of his greatest hits in the latest edition of our Role Recall series. Some highlights:
Cheers (1985-93) Harrelson’s breakout role came in the classic NBC sitcom, where he joined the ensemble in 1985 as the kind, yet dimwitted bartender Woody Boyd. “It was a friend of mine who told me that there was this part you should go try out for,” Harrelson explains. “The part’s named Woody, he’s from Indiana, where we had gone to college, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’
“There was a lot about Woody Boyd that I resonated with. And though I didn’t think I was very innocent at the time, I probably was pretty innocent. It was the first time I really broke out of anonymity — and poverty.”
White Men Can’t Jump (1992) Harrelson really couldn’t jump for the Ron Shelton comedy about two basketball hustlers, a fact that resulted in endless taunting (and wagering) from co-star Wesley Snipes. “That was one of the funnest times I ever had doing a movie. I remember having an actual contest with Wes where I was trying to dunk. We were betting and I was losing. Then he went to his trailer … and this [crew member] told me, “Why don’t you ever stretch?” This is my first introduction to yoga,” Harrelson recalls, “and I started stretching and the next thing you know, I could dunk the ball. This is on a 9-and-a-half-foot rim, by the way; I couldn’t do it on a 10-foot rim. … He came out of his trailer and I pretended I couldn’t and we upped the bet and upped the bet and then slammed it. I’ll never forget the look on Wes’s face: It was joyous.
Indecent Proposal (1993) This extremely popular, extremely un-P.C. film starred Robert Redford as mogul who offers Harrelson’s character $1 million for a night with his wife, played by Demi Moore. “My mom was pretty psyched,” says Harrelson. “She didn’t come to visit me on set much, but with Robert Redford was in the movie, she came to the set for sure. She was like a little girl. It was fantastic.”
Natural Born Killers (1994) Harrelson and Juliette Lewis played a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde in Oliver Stone’s graphically violent road-trip movie that polarized audiences upon its release. “I didn’t know it would be that controversial. It was very controversial,” says Harrelson. “People are like, ‘Do you like doing controversial movies?’ I’m like, ‘Hell, no. I like doing movies people would go see, not movies people are boycotting.'”
The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) Harrelson reteamed with Stone and earned his first Oscar nomination playing Hustler magnate Larry Flynt in this biopic. “I wouldn’t have been much into doing this movie if I hadn’t come to respect Larry. I don’t respect much the pornography part of what he does,” Harrelson quickly adds, “But what he is as a person, and the rebel that he is, and even what he did recently offering $10 million for any information that leads to the impeachment of our so-called president… I’ve never met a more honest man.”
The Hunger Games (2012-15) For the blockbuster four-film saga based on the bestselling book series, Harrelson played mentor to Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen. “I love Jen,” Harrelson says with a smile. “She’s absolutely hysterical. She’s her own person. I love who she is. I think she’s a tremendous actress, but even more so as a person, she’s one of my top favorite people in the world.”
True Detective (2014) Harrelson and partner Matthew McConaughey both earned Emmy nominations for HBO’s esoteric mystery thriller. “Love working with Matthew, that’s the third thing we did together,” Harrelson says, ticking off their collaborations in EDtv and Surfer Dude. “He’s a hard-core committed guy… Man, what a performance.” But despite their good vibes on set and off, that doesn’t mean Harrelson wants to reprise their partnership for a follow-up season of True Detective. “I don’t see doing that because it went really well the first time and if you come back around to it, what else are you going to hear? ‘Not as good. Wasn’t as good. Boy, you guys were good before, but this time…’ I don’t want to hear that.”
Watch the complete Role Recall above.
Here’s Woody on why he almost didn’t appear in the upcoming Star Wars movie:
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‘Natural Born Killers’ Turns 20: Shocking Then, True Now
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Twenty years ago this week, Oliver Stone lit a stick of cinematic dynamite in the theaters of America with the release of his abrasive, divisive, and controversial film Natural Born Killers. Based on a script by American cinema’s then-new enfant terrible Quentin Tarantino (it was a loose adaptation: he only got story credit in the end), and directed by the always outspoken Stone, the film was practically engineered to stir controversy, even on its release in the sleepy end of August. And indeed, the film caused an impact that left aftershocks for years, if not decades.
Tarantino’s screenplay focused on Mickey and Mallory (played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis), husband-and-wife mass murderers who become a media phenomenon after a cross-country killing spree. When Stone came on board, he and partners David Veloz and Richard Rutowski heavily rewrote the script (much to Tarantino’s displeasure), amping up the media satire. By the time the film hit theaters — after having been trimmed by four minutes to avoid an NC-17 from the MPAA — it couldn’t have been better placed to get attention. After all, the previous months had given America the bizarre spectacle of Tonya Harding’s assault on Nancy Kerrigan and live coverage of O.J. Simpsons’ attempted getaway in the infamous white Bronco.
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Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino, 1994
 As Stone wrote at the time, “When we set out to make Natural Born Killers in late 1992, it was surreal. By the time it was finished in 1994, it had become real.” But he didn’t realize quite how real, as the movie — which would gross $50 million at the box office — soon found itself at the center of the kind of media firestorm it had set out to satirize. In March 1995, not long after the film was released on VHS, 18-year-old Benjamin James Darras and his 19-year-old girlfriend Sarah Edmondson traveled from Oklahoma to Tennessee on a shooting rampage of their own, killing a cotton-gin manager and paralyzing a convenience-store clerk. The pair was swiftly arrested, and it emerged that, shortly before their violent spree, they’d taken LSD and watched Natural Born Killers.
 Darras and Edmondson were the first to be dubbed Mickey-and-Mallory “copycats,” but they wouldn’t be the last. As many as 14 separate crimes over the next fifteen years were linked by the media to the movie, from Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold  (who used ‘NBK’ as a codename for their plans) to Jeremy Allan Steinke, who, with his 12-year-old girlfriend, killed her parents and younger brother — allegedly after watching the movie the night before and vowing to go “Natural Born Killer on her family.”
Movies had been accused of inspiring violence before: President Reagan’s attempted assassin John Hinckley had been obsessed with Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and Stanley Kubrick asked that A Clockwork Orange be withdrawn from release in Britain after the film was linked to a series of alleged copycat crimes. But Natural Born Killers was something else: A brutal, unapologetically violent major-studio movie (it was produced by Warner Bros.) which not only painted a pair of mass-murderers as heroes, but also let their violent deeds go unpunished (the film concludes with a flash-forward scene of Mickey and Mallory, now parents, taking their brood on a road trip — an alternative ending, included on the DVD, has the couple killed by the very same inmate that helped them break out of prison).
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Even desensitized viewers raised an eyebrow, and with the ongoing culture wars — and growing scrutiny on Hollywood from politicians and pundits  — Stone’s film became a focal point for charges of moral irresponsibility and was the target of a major lawsuit: in March 1996, Byers and her attorneys filed suit against the director and Warner Bros., among others, alleging they shared culpability in her shooting by inspiring Darras and Edmondson’s violent actions.
The case achieved an even higher profile when attorney and bestselling novelist John Grisham, who’d been a friend of Bill Savage — the murdered cotton-gin manager — attacked Stone and the movie. Grisham (no stranger to Hollywood, thanks to big-screen adaptations of The Firm and The Client) argued that continued legal action could help create a sea-change in movie violence, writing: “It will take only one large verdict against the likes of Oliver Stone, and his production company, and perhaps the screenwriter, and the studio itself, and then the party will be over.”
 After years of arguments over whether the film was protected under the First Amendment, both suits were eventually dismissed in 2001 (four years after Byers had passed away from cancer). And Darras, who is still serving out his sentence and is now a repentant born-again Christian, has called the link to the movie “an invention of defense lawyers,” saying that the pair also watched the more innocuous Fantasia and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse on the night in question. But the film’s reputation has never entirely recovered.
 Both Stone and Tarantino have stuck to their metaphorical (and literal) guns in the nearly two decades since Natural Born Killers' release: their recent movies, Django Unchained and Savages, were both bloody and R-rated. Last year, Tarantino said on NPR’s Fresh Air that “Obviously, the issue is gun control and mental health.” Stone, meanwhile, acknowledged to the Guardian in 2002, that a film can influence a viewer, but suggested, “it’s not a film’s responsibility to tell you what the law is. And if you kill somebody, you’ve broken the law.”
Ultimately, Stone has always emphasized that the film was, first and foremost, a critique of the media’s reaction to — and celebration of — the likes of Mickey and Mallory. In the same Guardian interview, he said “Natural Born Killers was never intended as a criticism of violence. Violence is in us — it’s a natural state of man. What I was doing was pointing the finger at the system that feeds off that violence, and at the media that package it for mass consumption.”
 It was hard to miss his point in the movie itself: looking back after twenty years, it stands as blunt-force satire, entirely unsubtle about its message, and less effective for it. There’s no room for nuance in Stone’s worldview, from his simplistic points about Mickey and Mallory’s abusive backgrounds causing their criminal behavior, to the virtually cartoonish performances from Robert Downey, Jr. (playing a sleazy Australian news anchor) and Tommy Lee Jones (starring as a prison warden, and acting more over-the-top than he did in the following year’s ham-fest Batman Forever). And one can’t also help think that the director was trying to have his cake and eat it too: he stacks the deck, with the system that seeks to repress Mickey and Mallory (as represented by both Jones, and Tom Sizemore as a psychotic cop) being far more evil than the murderers, which seems to be an attempt to excuse their behavior. Stone wags his finger at his anti-heroes while simultaneously glorifying them.
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But Stone’s contention that “people can be ignited by anything” (comparing the “scapegoating” of the movie to the defense of Dan White, who claimed that eating too many Twinkies had caused him to kill Harvey Milk) is a good one: millions of people have watched Natural Born Killers without going on to cause harm to others. And while the film has dated badly in many respects — most notably in its hyperactive Bonnie-And-Clyde-gone-MTV style, which is as exhausting now as it was exhilarating then — it’s also felt more and more prescient as time’s gone on.
Two decades years have gone by since the film’s release. Round-the-clock news cycles have gotten hungrier (not the least with the influence of, and too-often-ensuing misinformation from, social media). Basic-cable true-crime shows like the one Downey, Jr.’s character presents have only grown more popular, to the extent that there’s an entire network, Investigation Discovery, now devoted to them. Mass-murderers have made the cover of Rolling Stone, and inspired online fanbases. Stone might have been making his points with the delicacy of a sledgehammer, but it feels like everyone should have been paying more attention nevertheless. 
Photo credits: © Everett Collection, © Getty Images 1994 
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Mickey's Bad Trip
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Drawn to Each Other
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Natural Born Lovers by Brett Parson / Website
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