Good to See You Back, Woody

With a slew of movies coming out this year, and the world finally catching up to his radical green politics, Woody Harrelson has found his groove again. Now, would someone please get this man some proper shoes?

by Neal Pollack

The clientele at Maha Yoga is what you might expect at 4 PM on a Saturday at a studio in Brentwood: high-powered female lawyers and their preteen daughters, musclehead male models, and a smattering of sensible NPR listeners. Then Woody Harrelson walks in the side door, red-eyed, stubbled, and bleary. He’s come straight from LAX.

“I just got back from Kentucky,” he says in his familiar laid-back drawl. “I was working with a scientist on a new invention that will revolutionize how we clean up sewage. It’s pretty cool. Usually our government treats our toxic sewage waste with a bunch of even more toxic chemicals, and then declares it safe for drinking. The method we’re developing does it naturally, with no chemicals, and it’s 85 to 90 percent clean when it comes out. I think we’re gonna start with hog waste.”

He claps his hands together once. “All right!” he says. “Let’s do some yoga!”

He unzips his hemp yoga bag (which goes well with his hemp yoga pants), removes his hemp yoga mat, unrolls it about 10 yards behind me to my right, and starts to stretch. The instructor glides into the room.

“Oh, I know that dude,” Woody says.

The dude knows Woody, too.

“Hey, what’s happening, Woody?”

“Not much, man,” Woody says.

“Good to see you back!”

An hour and a half later, after a vigorous class, we lower down into shavasana, lying perfectly still on our mats in the quiet, low-lit room. As the yogi starts to talk us back to full consciousness, there’s a loud, hacking snore. Even as we’re told to open our eyes, the snore continues. I look behind me.

Woody is lying on his mat, sawing away. If this were a cartoon, he’d be keeping a feather aloft.

We sit up cross-legged. He’s still snoring. The entire class chants ohm together. Woody sleeps on through, and stays asleep when the lights come on. Finally, he snorts awake, looks around, and hops up bright-eyed and refreshed, as if he’d just slept 10 hours. “I always fall asleep during shavasana,” he says. “It’s the best rest I get.”

"Woody,” the bartender from Cheers, is a distant Nick at Nite memory now, and the leading-man Woody of Indecent Proposal, Natural Born Killers, and The People vs. Larry Flynt is in deep rerun mode on cable. Even Harrelson’s best-known political actions — getting arrested for scaling the Golden Gate Bridge to protest the logging of California redwoods and for planting hemp seeds in Kentucky — are more than a decade in the past. The Woody we have now, at age 46, is a mature model, less in-your-face. After years of soul-searching and wandering, including a virtual five-year hiatus from movie acting, he’s returned as a guy fully at ease with himself, but still unique, even deeply strange.

As an activist he’s Abbie Hoffman crossed with Al Gore, using his winking charm to put people at ease, then quietly, subtly, bending the room to his will. As an actor he’s found a new niche that works for him, taking on eccentric, challenging, often supporting roles in movies that he wants to do. It’s kept him busy. He’s in a half-dozen films this year alone, from the new Ferrell-fest Semi-Pro to the quieter Battle in Seattle (an upcoming indie docudrama about the 1999 WTO protests) to a fall Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy called Management. Harrelson has been working lately with some of the best directors in the business (Robert Altman, Oliver Stone, the Coen brothers) while trying to develop a multibillion-dollar process that would mass-produce paper without wood pulp. Under the stoner facade is a guy who gets things done.

Semi-Pro director Kent Alterman, who cast Woody as the hardscrabble veteran on an ABA-era basketball team, tells a variation of the kind of story many friends share about Harrelson. “Woody, in between setups, was always playing basketball,” he says. “He had an uncanny ability to have fun and have an awareness that he was performing. We had this big crowd of extras, and he really kept them engaged and entertained. He would just start trying crazy shots backwards over his head at half-court. He had everyone in the arena watching him, and at a certain point he’d hit the shot, and people would go crazy.”

It’s the same dramatic flair he employed in 2001 when he took a bike ride from Seattle to Los Angeles, accompanied by a biofueled bus, to advocate leaving a lighter footprint on earth and to try to convert folks he met along the way. The trip was made into a documentary film called Go Further.

The two Woodys, the crowd-pleaser and the rabble-rouser, might seem at odds, but to Woody it all jibes. “There’s a pretty amazing thing that happens in this industry when you have success,” he says. “Everyone is telling you that you’re great, and basically you just become kind of like world royalty. Wherever you go, doors open. In a sense it’s wonderful. It’s like something anybody would want. But in another sense it narrows your focus, so you end up becoming a little too self-focused. At least that’s what happened to me. To get out from the clutches of that is a journey. A good journey.”

It was a confluence of factors that led him to take time off from Hollywood in the early 2000s. A political backlash against the Larry Flynt film, a role that brought him an Oscar nomination, slowed down the leading-man offers, he says. And he made a conscious decision, he tells me, to back away from the “hedonism/narcissism” and instead “hang with the fam.”

“It was gonna be a couple of years, and then it turned into five,” he says. “Best decision I ever made.”

His journey led him to Maui, where he lives with his wife Laura Louie (an environmental activist and his former assistant) and their three daughters (ages one to 15). He’s not just squatting in some vacation house; it’s more like homesteading. They’re in a remote coastal town called Kipahulu, a place where there’s no shopping other than an adjacent organic farm called Laulima, which has baked goods for sale. Residents make poi at a community center and allow no genetically modified organisms to cross the town’s boundaries. Kipahulu is built, to some extent, as a primitivist denial of modernity. Woody has been there about eight years now, after getting an introduction to Maui from his good friend Willie Nelson.

“I’m sure glad I found it,” he says. “It’s really an amazing community of people. It’s off the grid, there’s no power lines. Most of the people there, including us, run their vehicles and their tractors and stuff off of biodiesel. A lot of things are ideal. We all get together for Thanksgiving, different holidays, and look after each other’s kids. It’s a real community, like one I’ve never been a part of in my life.”

After the yoga class Woody takes me to Planet Raw, a joint in Santa Monica that advertises itself as “the first living vegan organic restaurant.” I tell him I’ve never eaten at a raw restaurant before, and with all sincerity, as though he’s prepared the food himself, Woody says, “Aw, I hope you like it.”

We order endives stuffed with pine-nut cheese, a stew of wild mushrooms, Thai soup, a salad with black-truffle dressing, an elixir of fuji apple, ginger, lime, and pomegranate, a lasagna with macadamia ricotta and zucchini noodles, and pesto pizza with deep-dish crust. “For food-combining purposes,” the restaurant recommends eating dessert first, so before we dig into all that, we have a pumpkin “cheesecake” and some chocolate liquid “s’mores.” The food has hues not normally seen at meals, obscure pinks and purples and greens, like dinner on Venus.

Between bites of truffle salad I say to Woody, “I read somewhere that you have life licked.”

He thinks about this for a moment, and then says, “Sometimes I do feel that way. Inside my circle of family and friends, I feel great about everything. But, you know, there’s so much fucked about the world, most particularly the industries that make up the American world economy being the puppet masters to all the politicians, and then us, below that, saying what the hell are we gonna do? And that I find so intensely frustrating.”

We talk for a while about his activist work, about inequitable distribution of resources, corporate greed, the uselessness of putting people in jail for victimless crimes. But with Woody the conversation inevitably turns back to the environment. “It’s like we’re all on the Titanic,” he says. “And it’s a wonderful party and the violins are playing. Yeah, we feel a big bump, we may even have heard somebody shout, ‘We hit something,’ but it’s the Titanic. We can’t go down. Listen to some music, drink some more wine. And I’m all for that. The party of life. But on the other hand, I would seriously have to be lacking sensitivity to not be aware that we are in major trouble right now. Either we turn things around or we’re gonna eliminate a lot of species along the way, and it won’t be long before we eliminate our own.”

A woman approaches the table. “Hi, Woody,” she says.

“How ya doin’?” he says enthusiastically, as if he’s known her his whole life.

“I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed the documentary you did about no corn dogs.”

“Oh, Go Further.”

“It was awesome.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it.”

When she leaves Woody tells me how he plans to go even further. “As soon as I get a period when I’m not working or doing anything, I’m going to go to a small island in Hawaii, a really remote place, and drink the water right from the stream. And then consume nothing else for 40 days. I’ve always wanted to do it. I mean, I don’t take it lightly. I know it’s gonna be hard. But can you imagine? Eating nothing for 40 days? Swimming and surfing every day in a remote place? Where does the mind go?”

Joe Hickey is the grandson of a Kentucky hemp farmer. In the early ’90s, gradually and by degrees, he became one of the state’s leading advocates for growing hemp, to the point where he got the governor to start a task force and got the Kentucky state senate to allow hemp crops. But the movement got bogged down in the state legislature, and Hickey needed help.

“My son answered the phone one day,” Hickey recalls, “and said, ‘Dad, Woody Harrelson’s on the phone for you.’ I answered the phone, and it sure sounded like Woody. We hit it off. That was on a Monday. He came in on a Friday, was gonna stay two days, ended up staying four, and had his wife flown in.”

From there Hickey and Harrelson hatched a plot. They called in the police and media to watch Woody plant hemp seeds, which led to Woody’s arrest, which led to an epic trial, which led to Woody getting off and the limited legalization of hemp as a crop in Kentucky. Hickey became the head of Tierra Madre, Woody’s company that helps develop alternative eco-friendly technologies, and helps run Voiceyourself.com, Woody’s website. And they became the best of friends.

“Woody is just such an affable character,” Hickey says. “He moves through the world with ease. The reason he’s able to do that is because of the way he treats people. There is nobody in the world that is more honest than Woody is. If you ask Woody a question, he’s going to tell you the answer. He’s not going to beat around the bush. You never walk away saying, I wonder what he thinks about that.”

Woody’s collection of friends would be the envy of anyone: Owen Wilson, Sean Penn, Javier Bardem, Matthew McConaughey, Willie Nelson, and just about anyone else who’s ever met him. “He’s not a guy who’s gonna keep you out of his life,” says Tom Ballanco, an activist attorney who’s worked with Woody on many causes. “He says, ‘Hey, let’s hang out.’ And that’s why we’ve gotten along so well. He’s fun to be around. Not in the sense that it’s always a party, though there is that aspect. It’s more often going to the beach or doing yoga. It’s fun because he’s right there. I’ve seen him converse with presidents, janitors, and people on the street, and that alone is quite an attribute.”

What Ballanco really admires about Woody is that, unlike some celebrities, he’s no armchair activist. “He really is living the life he’s advocating. He drives a biodiesel car, lives in a solar-powered house, eats a vegan diet. And he’s been doing that for a long time. He gets a lot of respect from a lot of actors and other celebrities higher up on the list. I think a lot of that is due to the integrity of his lifestyle."

By all accounts Woody has been a steady support for his buddy Owen Wilson after Wilson’s suicide attempt last year. Woody isn’t particularly forthcoming about this. “What I can tell you is pretty minimal,” he says over dinner at Planet Raw. “I think he’s doing amazing. He hit a low point, and he bounced back beautifully. But I do think he’s one of the greatest guys I’ve ever known.”

He’s even less forthcoming when I ask him about his father, Charles Harrelson, a contract killer who died in prison last year and who sometimes claimed that he was the man who actually killed JFK. “He was in prison from 1968 until he died,” Woody says. “He was out for a little over a year in 1979. He was a brilliant guy. Great storyteller, really fun to be with. But you know, the skills that he ultimately possessed were taught to him by this government.”

“Meaning he was a soldier?” I ask.

“He was asked to do some special things for the government. They wanted to know if he really wanted to serve his country.”

“What are you referring to?”

“Let’s leave a little ambiguity there.”

This is obviously a source of deep discomfort for Woody, who is normally open to talking about anything. Though Woody backed an effort in the late ’90s to get his father a new trial for his murder case, and visited him in prison late in his life, his father didn’t play much of a role in his upbringing. Woody’s mother, a strict Presbyterian, raised him and his two brothers in Texas and Ohio — until he went to New York to pursue an acting career, and at 24 became a regular cast member on one of the most popular sitcoms of all time.

Woody scowls a little, looks down, and begins twiddling on his BlackBerry. He doesn’t own a cell phone because of reports that they irradiate your brain. It’s almost as though a thundercloud has descended over the table. For a moment, instead of Woody the bartender, I see Natural Born Killer Woody, the guy who occasionally gets into scuffles with bouncers, taxicab drivers, and paparazzi, the guy with a temper, the guy with whom you wouldn’t want to mess.

Then Planet Raw chef Juliano stops by the table, and Woody turns all fun and smiles again. Juliano is wiry and bearded. He wears a multicolored striped shirt and smells of patchouli. They get reacquainted for a while, and then Juliano, who lives upstairs, invites us to his place after dinner “for something else raw.”

We finish our meal and pay. Woody stands up and pats me on the back. “Let’s go, wild man,” he says.

As we head toward the elevator I notice that Woody isn’t wearing shoes. He hasn’t been wearing shoes all day.

“Yeah, I was in a cold climate,” he says. “And I had these big fucking boots on. I wasn’t going to wear them here.”

Pause.

“I really do need to get some shoes though.”

We spend most of our time in Juliano’s pad listening to the chef pitch a screenplay he wrote about an animal vivisector who becomes an animal-rights activist. It’s called Simon Says, and it also features a boy who goes off into the forest, hides out with a chimp, and emerges a vegetarian. This project, Juliano says, would be perfect for Woody, at least to have his name attached as a producer.

“Well, give me the script,” Woody says. “That’s all I can do.”

The pitch goes on for a while longer. We talk about other things. Woody calls Into the Wild “the most eco-minded movie I’ve seen.”

“If you liked that, you’ll love Simon Says,” says the chef.

After a while, Woody stands up and stretches. “I think I should take off,” he says. He looks around. “Hey, Juliano, you got any sandals?”

Juliano goes into his closet and pulls out a pair of Aldo dress shoes that would have been fine if Woody were going to a bar mitzvah. The only other pair are some black “vegan earth shoes” with holes at the big toes.

“What do I care?” says Woody, who’s wearing a dirty old sweatshirt. “You see how I dress. It’s not like someone’s going to say, ‘What’s with the shoes?’”

We move toward the door.

“Man,” Woody says. “I have to go to Hollywood for this birthday party for a friend of mine, but I really want to get home. After Sundance, and then staying up all night playing poker in Kentucky, I’ll tell you, I can see why sleep deprivation is an effective torture technique.”

As he stands there I can see the exhaustion wash over him. His eyes look like Ren from Ren and Stimpy. He smiles in a lunatic gaze. And then he’s back again.

“One time,” he says,  I