SUCH is the level of typecasting associated with actors in long-running television series that very few of them, no matter how popular they are on the small screen, successfully make the difficult transition to the cinema screen. The long list of casualties includes Roseanne Barr, Shelley Long, Ellen DeGeneres, Ted Danson and even Michael J. Fox, who starred in the hugely popular Back To The Future series and is now back where he started, in a television series (Spin City).
One actor who has made the transition with apparent ease is Woody Harrelson - to the great surprise of the many who assumed he would be identified for life with the clueless but amiable Woody Boyd character he played in Cheers for eight seasons. When we met in London recently, Harrelson said that he will be forever grateful to director Michael Caton-Jones who cast him six years ago in a supporting role in Doc Hollywood - ironically, the movie starred Michael J. Fox and Ron Shelton who gave him his first leading role in White Men Can't Jump.
Even more surprising has been the leap Harrelson has taken from innocuous comedies to the incendiary controversies of Natural Born Killers and The People vs. Larry Flynt. Even Kingpin, the bowling comedy which he made in between those two movies, contained some of the crudest humour imaginable in a mainstream American feature film, and In decent Proposal, which preceded those three movies for him, generated acres of editorial copy despite the film's sheer daftness.
This year, at the age of 35, Harrelson earned an Oscar nomination a best actor for his performance as Larry Flynt, the publisher of the explicit and exploitative pornographic magazine, Hustler. Seated on the floor of his London hotel and doing stretching exercises, Harrelson exudes a laid-back, dry-humoured attitude and he speaks in a leisurely drawl.
"Is Natural Born Killers still banned in Ireland?" he asks. It is, I tell him. "We thought we were making a comedy about over-the-top screen violence," he says. "I thought it would be considered a really dark satire, but I think a lot of people missed the point. It's so easy for Oliver Stone to be people's whipping boy, but I admire him. He's a brave film-maker."
During the fuss over Natural Born Killers it emerged that Woody Harrelson's father has been serving a double life sentence for murder since 1978, when Woody was 17. The actor does not discuss the matter beyond stating his belief that his father was working for the CIA at the time. Woody's younger brother, Brett has followed him into acting and has a supporting role in Larry Flynt as Flynt's brother, Jimmy.
Larry Flynt reunites Harrelson with Stone, who co-produced the movie. "Did they ban Larry Flynt in Ireland?" he wonders. "No? That's good," he says. What it is that draws Harrelson to such controversial material? "I just try to ride the wave, whatever it is," he drawls. "I'm not deliberately seeking out controversy. It's an easy thing to be controversial. All you need is to tell the truth and you're already in hot water."
The opportunity of working with director Milos Forman was what initially attracted Harrelson to playing Larry Flynt. "My first thought when I heard about this script was, `Why would you want to make a movie about him". But the more I learned about his life, I got really interested. A lot of people would judge him as a pornographer and that's it, case closed, mind closed about it. To me, he has a lot of very interesting things to say, and he's a very honest guy. His life was like very few lives.
"I think was a bit reticent because my early impressions of Larry Flynt were negative. They were formed by the religious community I was living in - we were not far from Cincinnati when the obscenity trials were going on." Harrelson grew up in a poor family in a strictly religious community in Lebanon, Ohio.
"It actually used to be a Shaker community," he says. "I don't know if you've heard of them, but the Shakers made great furniture. But they were so puritanical that when it came to sex they allowed no sex whatsoever. Zero. Not even to procreate. So there are no more Shakers, but we do have their furniture," he adds with a chortle. "My mother was very religious. I went to church, I had bible study, youth group, sang in the choir and went to college to study theology on a Presbyterian scholarship. I had that period in my life.
Did he read Hustler? "I wouldn't say that I read it as such," he drawls. "I scanned it." And what did he think of it? "Ummm," he pauses. There's some of Hustler that's going to offend anybody. I think Hustler magazine prides itself on offending as many people as possible across all races and genders. A lot of the cartoons in it really make me laugh, though there's some twisted humour in there. There's a lot of other stuff, on the Ku Klux Klan or who shot JFK, for example, that was most offensive to the establishment, I think."
To research playing Flynt, Harrelson spent some time staying at the pornographer's famously ostentatious Beverly Hills mansion. "I was surprised when I first met him in his office," he says. "It's a very opulent set-up, you know, with Tiffany lamps and Gucci furnishings a very upscale place with a lot of security, understandably. At first he seemed very staid, but the more he opened up, I got to know him. He's a straight shooter, always, and he's a real firecracker. He stirs it up, which I like."
Woody Harrelson is quoted as saying he asked Flynt "some very pointed questions" and got some very candid replies. Such as? He laughs and there is a very long pause before he replies. "You know," he says eventually, "I asked him what was his first time. He said it was with a chicken. And I thought that was pretty candid, don't you think? I wasn't expecting that!
"He also says that anyone who grows up on a farm, their first time is with one of the animals, or they're lying. I don't know how true that is, but that's his statement." In Larry Flynt's autobiography, An Unseemly Man, he notes that he later celebrated that loss of his virginity by installing a three-foot replica of the chicken in his Ohio mansion.
As for the vigorous backlash against the film, spearheaded by the feminist, Gloria Steinem, Harrelson believes it has been misdirected. "I think it's grandstanding. If you want to get to what the root of the problem is, as opposed to dealing with the symptoms, then you have to address what it is that creates this uneasiness with sexuality. So you have to get into - and I'm no exception - what it is about our religious upbringing that makes us feel that anytime sex is outside of wedlock - when it's not for procreation, and when it's enjoyed - that it's bad.
"That's what creates the whole issue around pornography. Why is it that a woman's body is a dirty picture? Then again, why can men go around with their tops off and women can't? There are a lot of things I find hard to understand. As for Gloria Steinem, I don't know what she's trying to accomplish for women. I think she got the opportunity to have her name bandied about yet again, so that must be a good thing for her."
But don't she have a point when she says that the movie avoids showing any of the most explicit and degrading imagery published in Hustler? "To me it's unfortunate," he says. "It would be like condemning Charlie Chaplin for playing Hitler (in The Great Dictator) without showing the genocide that took place. This movie is not about the pictorials in Hustler magazine. That speaks for itself.
"In making this movie we're not trying to hide that these pictorials exist. We're not trying to hide that he's a pornographer. We're just not dealing with it in any great detail. To me, the people who really merit judgment are the" people who are raping Mother Earth. That to me is the ultimate. I don't have the same understanding of four letter words being bad, just because someone said they're bad. To me, bad words are Dupont, Charles Horowitz, petrochemical."
Harrelson says that the ferocity of the backlash against the movie saddened him. "That bummed me out, he says." "It's unfortunate because it's a great movie, I think, and Milos did a masterful job, and every time he gets up to bat, people should run to see his movies.
HARRELSON and Forman got the movie's only two Oscar nominations and the actor says he was pleasantly shocked to be nominated. He has come a very long way from Cheers in a relatively short time. And he may yet be back in the beam of controversy with his next movie, Michael Winterbottom's topical "Welcome To Sarajevo, which seems assured of a place in competition at Cannes next month.
