Woody Harrelson
Woody Harrelson is an actor, born 1961.
Woody Harrelson arrived as Woody Boyd, the guileless Indiana bartender on Cheers, played him for eight years and won a Primetime Emmy for it out of five nominations. Being that good at amiable stupidity is normally a life sentence. He got out by taking parts nobody would have offered the character: a basketball hustler in White Men Can't Jump, a mass murderer in Natural Born Killers, then Larry Flynt, which brought a first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
The Texas drawl is the misdirection. Harrelson holds two temperatures inside a single line, so a friendly sentence carries an edge and a threatening one carries a joke, and directors have exploited that in opposite directions for thirty years. Carson Wells in No Country for Old Men is the compressed version: charming, competent, extremely confident and wrong. The sheriff in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is the warm version, and brought a third Oscar nomination after The Messenger.
He has spent the past fifteen years as reliable support in very large films, playing Haymitch across four Hunger Games entries, a symbiote host in the Venom films, a smuggler in Solo: A Star Wars Story and the Colonel in War for the Planet of the Apes. Television has stayed good to him too, with Emmy nominations for Game Change and for True Detective, where he takes the ordinary, compromised half of a partnership and makes it the harder role. His other honours include an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male and a Screen Actors Guild ensemble award.
Movies (98)
- Now You See Me: Now You Don't (2025)
- No Country for Old Men (2007)
- The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (2014)
- 2012 (2009)
- Venom (2018)
- Now You See Me (2013)
- Now You See Me 2 (2016)
- Indecent Proposal (1993)
- The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)
- Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)
- War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
- Midway (2019)
- Animal Farm (2026)
- The Hunger Games (2012)
- Zombieland (2009)
- Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)
- The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015)
- The Electric State (2025)
- Friends with Benefits (2011)
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
- Money Train (1995)
- The Thin Red Line (1998)
- Natural Born Killers (1994)
- Ella McCay (2025)
- Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)
- Seven Pounds (2008)
- The Big White (2005)
- Last Breath (2025)
- Anger Management (2003)
- Fly Me to the Moon (2024)
TV (5)
Where to start with Woody Harrelson
No Country for Old Men gives him about ten minutes and is the fastest route to understanding the appeal. Wells walks in as the competent professional the film has been waiting for, and Harrelson plays that confidence with total conviction.
For range, Natural Born Killers is the loud experiment and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri the humane one, a small-town sheriff written with more decency than the genre usually permits. True Detective is the best long-form work: he takes the less interesting half of a double act and quietly makes it the sadder one.
Comedy is where he is most underrated. Zombieland runs almost entirely on his timing, White Men Can't Jump is a trash-talking two-hander that still holds up, and The Edge of Seventeen casts him as a teacher whose deadpan is the funniest thing in a very funny film. For something recent, Triangle of Sadness hands him a drunk Marxist captain and fifteen glorious minutes.
Harrelson when the film lets him be dangerous
He can be warm and genuinely menacing inside one scene, which is why the Coens and McDonagh keep calling. No Country is confidence right up until it stops helping, Natural Born Killers is the unhinged version, and True Detective is the long slow one.
The comedies where he is happily unwell
The Cheers years taught him to play amiable, and the film comedies are funniest when the amiability is slightly wrong. Zombieland is the one everyone quotes, and Anger Management and Friends with Benefits are him enjoying being the loose element.
Harrelson in the franchises
Haymitch is the best thing in The Hunger Games films, a drunk mentor played with real bitterness rather than comic relief. Venom and Solo are the paycheque end, and War for the Planet of the Apes gives him a genuinely nasty part.