L'attore texano con la faccia da psicopatico nasce nel 1961 a Midland e subito dopo il college si trasferisce a New York, iniziando a lavorare in teatro. La fortuna gliela regala però il piccolo schermo, grazie alla sua partecipazione, durata otto anni, alla sit-com Cin Cin (nel 1989 ottiene anche un Emmy come "miglior attore non protagonista").
Il debutto nel mondo del cinema avviene nell'86 con Wildcats, accanto a Goldie Hawn, ma la sua affermazione prosegue con successo in Chi non salta bianco è (1992), Proposta indecente (1993), ma soprattutto in uno dei ruoli più riusciti della sua carriera, l'innamorato pazzo Mickey Knox di Natural Born Killers (1994), pazza storia d'amore e morte on the road in cui recita accanto alla sua Mallory/Juliette Lewis diretto da Oliver Stone.

Altra egregia interpretazione è quella di Larry Flynt - oltre lo scandalo di Milos Forman, ma anche quella di Kingpin dei fratelli Farrelly, fino ad arrivare a essere diretto da mostri sacri del cinema americano come Terrence Malick (in La sottile linea rossa), Robert Altman (Radio America), Paul Schrader (The Walker), i fratelli Coen (Non è un paese per vecchi).

Loves the Beach, the Planet and Movies
WOODY HARRELSON was late. Not Hollywood, Big Star late, just a few tardy minutes because he couldn’t talk a meter here into giving him more than 15 minutes, and had wasted all his quarters. He had no “people” in tow to park the car. He cadged a few quarters from the folks at the restaurant Juliano’s Raw, left to find a more forgiving parking spot and then returned, plunking quarters down on the table as he sat.
“See, I made money on the deal,” he said, flashing a smile that is both knowing and a little deranged, one that most television viewers first encountered over the bar at “Cheers.”
The recipient of a fairly charmed career, Mr. Harrelson takes none of it for granted. While many actors spend time in interviews rubbing their chins and talking about plumbing the emotional depths of particular roles, he makes moviemaking sound more like a caper from Spanky and Our Gang.
“I love getting together and making something with a bunch of other people,” he said, leaving aside the dire, arduous rhetoric that seems to be the default of many other film actors of some renown.
And he seems to walk his talk. Apart from politics — he is frantic about the environment, the war in Iraq and what he views as the erosion of civil liberties — Mr. Harrelson wears life like a beach towel loosely around the shoulders and grabs what it offers with both hands, including a reporter’s nondairy chocolate shake that was left temporarily unguarded on the table. “Sorry about that,” he said, making it clear he was not one bit sorry as he licked his lips and looked for more. As the chef fluttered about, and Mr. Harrelson made his way through much of the vegan fare on the menu, it became clear that he is a man of significant appetites for almost everything but the darker arts of getting roles and pleasing mass audiences.

Over lunch last month he talked about the flurry of films he made after years of intermittent screen appearances, including “No Country for Old Men,” in which he plays a duped hit man; “The Walker,” in which he is a Truman Capote-inspired fop; and “The Grand,” a comedy that plays out over a poker table. He’s also one of the characters in an on-screen reading of historical material in “Nanking,” a documentary about the so-called rape of Nanking in 1937.
He is back after an extended break, having temporarily lost his ability to laugh at the business after the campaign against “The People vs. Larry Flynt” in 1997. Gloria Steinem had called for a boycott of the film, which starred Mr. Harrelson as the pornographer editor of Hustler.
“That sort of broke my heart,” he said, “because what people were saying really had nothing to do with the work and what it was about. It was just politics.”
What was going to be a short break with his family — his wife, Laura Louie, and their three daughters at his home in Hawaii — became an extended hiatus, give or take some time directing and acting in theater to keep his chops.
“I was going to take a couple of years off, but the next thing you know it was almost five years,” he said. “It happily coincided with a time when I was getting a lot less offers from the studios, but if you are not enjoying this job, then there is something wrong with you. The only thing better than being an actor would probably be being a rock star or something like that.”
Now Mr. Harrelson is in the midst of a rekindled affair. “I love it,” he said of acting in films. “I have never been a big fan of the business of motion pictures, but the process, the work, is really fun if you do it with the right people.”
He has accumulated a stack of important credits almost in spite of himself, something that has made an impression on those who know him. “What else do you say about someone who has life licked, except that I resent him for it?” said James L. Brooks, a longtime director and friend since Mr. Harrelson’s days in television.
“He has a career with the kind of roles that I think anybody would be happy to have,” Mr. Brooks added. “He has done savage, textured villains, comedy and very serious dramatic roles. I saw him in London in Tennessee Williams’s ‘Night of the Iguana,’ and he was amazing.”
Mr. Harrelson, in Los Angeles for a few days on his way back from Amsterdam, where he attended the environmental symposium called Picnic, looked rested and fit. Though he claims not to work out, his deep affection for pastimes like kite surfing and yoga make him look as if he does. The day before an interview he had spent time with Luke and Owen Wilson, playing something he called “head tennis,” an ad-hoc sport that involves using everything but the hands to return a soccer ball over a tennis net.
It was clear, as he talked between bites, that his small but pivotal role in “No Country” had left a tantalizing taste in his mouth.
“I love those guys, just like every other actor,” he said of the Coen brothers, who wrote and directed the movie. “They are among the greatest filmmakers alive. They know exactly, exactly what they want. The first day of shooting I was in the last scene, and they still had me come in at 9 a.m., and I thought, ‘Well, that’s cool. I’ll get to watch them work all day.’ They were done by lunch. There was nothing in that movie that they had not thought through a long time before we ever got there.”
Mr. Harrelson floated into public consciousness in the mid-1980s as Woody, the spacey, guileless bartender in the popular sitcom “Cheers.” He spends no time distancing himself from the character or what it did for him.
“I thought I might eventually end up doing some quality regional theater,” he said. “Instead I end up with this role that everyone remembers. And hey, people who don’t even know me like me because of that role. That’s a pretty cool thing.
“Even cops like me,” he added, grinning about his having had a few run-ins here and there overhis advocacy of hemp and its more recreational cousin.
Over time the kid from the sticks — he grew up in Lebanon, Ohio — found himself working with A-list directors like Robert Altman (“A Prairie Home Companion”), Terrence Malick (“The Thin Red Line”), Milos Forman (“The People vs. Larry Flynt”) and, most notably, Oliver Stone (“Natural Born Killers”).
“Everybody paints Oliver as this kind of monster, like he gets on people’s nerves,” he said. “But the truth is, he is just this amazing big kid who really cares about getting it right. I can remember that I was going to do this robber scene that was this long shot where I was jumping over counters and going through glass. Just before the camera was going to roll, he came up to me and said: ‘This shot took two hours to set up. Don’t screw it up.’ And then he yelled, ‘Action!’ That was his idea of a pep talk.”
Mr. Harrelson may be quick to find the funny in almost anything, but then he has credibly played stone cold killers. If there is any darkness of the soul, it derives from the fact that his father, Charles Harrelson, was sentenced to two life terms for the contract killing of a federal judge in 1979. Mr. Harrelson financed an expensive effort to win his father a retrial, but the senior Mr. Harrelson died in March at a high-security federal prison in Florence, Colo.
“I would give anything, anything, just to have done with him what we are doing right now, which is to sit outside on a beautiful day having a meal,” he said. The wound is clearly still fresh. His eyes, which danced with amusement through several hours of an interview, misted, and he stopped talking for a few moments until a new topic came up.
Mr. Harrelson generally does not overthink his movie career — it’s all make-believe, after all — but he is full of opinions when it comes to small matters like saving the world. Sitting in Santa Monica eating high-end raw food, his 100 percent organic cotton shirt states it plainly: “If this is what global warming feels like, I’m against it.” He can riff on hemp, the dark ends of Big Pharma and the wages of conformity with alacrity. And he lives in Maui, a tough commute for a working actor, partly because he does not want himself or his family to be imprisoned by a grid of consumer culture and Los Angeles ambition.
“I feel like an alien creature for which there is no earthly explanation,” he says in a poem on VoiceYourself.com, a Web site that he and his wife founded to promote sustainable, organic living.
Later, down on the beach, he took in the sun-drenched waters and a bit of a breeze that kept the heat at bay.
“I’m a beach guy, but it’s hard to get over what they are dumping in it,” he said. “But still, it’s mostly beautiful. It’s part of the reason we live in Maui. We get in the water every day.”
“I started kite surfing about two months ago, and to me it’s about the greatest sport I have ever encountered,” he continued.
The last time he went, in a light wind, he hit the water a long ways from shore. “I had to swim a 15-meter kite all the way back in, with about 50 pounds of seaweed on each line.”
Shouldn’t there be people to look after a big movie star and the kite he splashed in the water?
“Yeah, I was wondering where my people were all the way in,” he said, laughing.
Da The New York Times, 25 Novembre 2007

Il raro mix di intensità e carisma di Woody Harrelson continua a sorprendere pubblico e critica per il suo impegno in progetti di major e indipendenti.
A dimostrazione del suo fascino variegato, Harrelson ha recentemente partecipato alle commedie Semi-Pro, assieme a Will Ferrell e Andre Benjamin, così come a Surfer, Dude, interpretato da Matthew McConaughey. Allo stesso tempo, è apparso assieme a Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem e Tommy Lee Jones nella pellicola dei fratelli Coen, vincitrice dell’Academy Award per il miglior film, Non è un paese per vecchi (No Country for Old Men). Per la sua interpretazione, Harrelson ha condiviso il SAG Award per il miglior cast.

Recentemente, è anche stato protagonista di Transsiberian di Brad Anderson, Battle in Seattle di Stuart Townsend e The Grand di Zak Penn.
L’acclamato ritratto del controverso editore Larry Flynt nella pellicola di Milos Forman Larry Flynt -oltre lo scandalo (The People Vs. Larry Flynt) gli è valsa delle candidature agli Academy Award, ai Golden Globe e agli Screen Actors Guild come miglior attore protagonista. Tra gli altri momenti importanti nella sua carriera cinematografica, ricordiamo After the Sunset, Incontriamoci a Las Vegas (Play It to the Bone), La sottile linea rossa (The Thin Red Line), The Hi-Lo Country, Edtv, Sesso e potere (Wag the Dog), Benvenuti a Sarajevo (Welcome to Sarajevo), Kingpin, Assassini nati (Natural Born Killers), Proposta indecente (Indecent Proposal), Chi non salta bianco è (White Men Can’t Jump), The Big White, A scanner darkly -Un oscuro scrutare (A Scanner Darkly), The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio e Radio America (A Prairie Home Companion).
Harrelson si è fatto conoscere da milioni di spettatori come membro del cast corale della serie comica di grande successo della NBC Cin cin (Cheers). Per il suo lavoro nei panni dell’affabile barista Woody Boyd, nel 1988 si è aggiudicato un Emmy ed è stato candidato in altre quattro occasioni a questo premio nel corso degli otto anni passati nel telefilm. Nel 1999, ha ottenuto un’altra candidatura agli Emmy quando ha ripreso il ruolo in un’apparizione nella serie spin-off Frasier. In seguito, è tornato in televisione grazie a un ruolo ricorrente nel telefilm di grande successo della NBC Will & Grace.
Oltre al suo lavoro al cinema e in televisione, nel 1999 Harrelson ha diretto la sua opera teatrale Furthest from the Sun al Theatre de la Jeune Lune di Minneapolis. In seguito, ha lavorato al revival di Broadway al Roundabout de Il mago della pioggia (The Rainmaker); a Le ultime ore di Henry Moss (The Late Henry Moss), di Sam Shepherd; e a On an Average Day di John Kolvenbach, al fianco di Kyle MacLachlan al West End di Londra. Harrelson ha diretto l’anteprima di Toronto di This is Our Youth di Kenneth Lonergan al Berkeley Street Theatre. Nell’inverno del 2005, è tornato al West End, partecipando a La notte dell’iguana (Night of the Iguana) di Tennessee Williams al Lyric Theatre.
Un impegnato ambientalista, ha unito il suo attivismo con il lavoro al cinema in Go Further di Ron Mann, un documentario on the road che segue Woody e i suoi amici mentre viaggiano in bicicletta sulla Pacific Coast Highway da Seattle a Santa Barbara.
Oltre a essere padre di tre meravigliose ragazze, è molto coinvolto con www.voiceyourself.com, un sito che ha creato con la moglie Laura Louie e che promuove e ispira gli sforzi individuali per creare un movimento globale verso una vita più semplice e naturale, in modo da riportare equilibrio e armonia sul nostro pianeta.