Playboy Interview: Woody Harrelson

A candid conversation with the free-spirited actor about tfiegood life in Haioaii, fight­ing sexual temptations and why he's not the poster boy for pot (as he smokes a joint)

Who would have predicted that Woody Har-relson would emerge as the biggest personality to come out of Cheers? Yes, Kelsey Grammer is prob­ably richer from Prosier, 'fed Danson hangs with Hillary Clinton, and Kirstie Alley has graced more tabloid covers. But nobody from that classic sitcom, which wrapped in 1993 after 11 years on NBC, h/is tackled challenging movie roles or lived a free-spirited existence the way Harrelson has.

Fit as a Texas fiddle at the age of 48, the actor, whose movies include Natural Born Kill­ers, The People vs. Larry Flynt and No Country for Old Men, is married with three kids, but that makes him sound conventional. He lives with his family on Maui, where he owns a scrappy up-country farmhouse that runs on solar power. Renowned for backing patchouli-scented causes like veganism, biodiesel technology and world peace, he's also an outspoken advocate of a popular Maui plant called cannabis, for rea­sons both practical (see his extensive wardrobe of hemp clothing) and recreational (in 1996 he was arrested for marijuana possession).

HarreLson ended a five-year work hiatus around 2001 and picked up with tlie same gusto he gives his hard-core yoga practice. This year he has five new films, most notably The Messenger, opening tliis month, in which he plays a soldier charged with notifying Army families about casualties of war, and 2012, a Roland Emmerich sci-fi disaster flick

about the end of the planet. It opens November 13.

Woodrow Tracy Harrelson was bom in Mid­land, Texas in 1961 but grew up in Lebanon, Ohio after his parents divorced. His mother, Diane, was a dexmil Presbyterian who taught young Woody to fear God and preach the Word. His father, Charles, was a professional gambler who spent most of his adult life in jail. In 1982 he was sentenced to two life terms in federal prison for his role in the assas­sination of U.S. District Judge John H. Wood Jr. The actor lobbied for years to have his father's case retried, claiming that his dad did not commit the murder, but Charles died in the Colorado Super-max prison in 2007 at the age of 69.

Harrelson began acting onstage, serving as an understudy in 1985 in Broadway's Biloxi Blues, only to end up marrying (briefly) the play­wright Neil Simon's daughter. That same year he landed the role of the dopey but lovable bartender Woody Boyd on Cheers, a show that earned Har­relson international fame and big-screen parts in such films as White Men Can't Jump and The Thin Red Line. With success came a reputation as a wild and crazy partyer with a hot temper. In 2002 Harrelson was arrested for vandalizing a London taxi, and this past April he got into a brawl with a TMZpaparazzo, later explaining he mistook the photographer for a zombie.

playboy dispatched Contributing Editor David Hochman to Hawaii for a meeting of the

minds. Says Hochman, whose last interview was until Shia LaBemif, "This was an old-fashioned interview of the Almost Famous variety. Woody opened his world—and his mind—for days of uninhibited conversation and fun. We swam to­gether, played Ping-Pong, ate raw foods, hung with the family, drove around in his biodiesel VW Bug and spent time with his island pal Willie Nelson. And yes, there was quite a bit of inhaling."

PLAYBOY: It's unusual for a celebrity to smoke marijuana during an interview. Are you trying to make a statement of some kind? HARRELSON: Not especially. I don't know-that it's a helpful thing as an actor to be the poster boy for the marijuana movement. Certainly the media uses it a lot to mar­ginalize. It also does a disservice to those who are actually on the front lines for the legalization cause. I've seen it printed that I'm a marijuana activist, and I understand that, but it's really just something I enjoy. PLAYBOY: What do you like about it? HARRELSON: Oh you know, some folks may have a drink. I think it's okay to have your alternatives. People may want to pop a pill before going to a party—that's not for me. Cocaine freaks me out. That's a drug with some crazy PR behind it. I don't know how it became so popular. It just makes you rant

and rave. But I like the mellow vibe of herb, its uninhibiting effect. For me, it's a better drug than any of the others, and since we're all drug addicts, I don't think it's a bad choice. PLAYBOY: We're all drug addicts? HARRELSON: I believe that, yes. Whether your drug is sugar, coffee, sex, exercise or religion—everybody has something. The biggest drug problem we face is pharma-ceuticals—prescription pills for everything. It's weird how fast you can get a bottle of pills these days. "Doctor, I'm depressed." "Doctor, my kid can't concentrate." In many schools if a kid is unruly a couple days in a row, the teachers can demand that parents put him on prescription drugs. Man, that pisses me off! Same with antidepressants. You lose your mind on that stuff. You lose touch with who you are, with your emotional state. I was two years on Ritalin; my brother was eight years on it. If you didn't have a drug addict before, you had one after. You have someone who's forever chasing the dream. PLAYBOY: Looking at your life in Maui, one would think you've found the dream. HARRELSON: I do love Maui, that's for sure. I was determined that once Cheers was off the air and it wasn't a matter of necessity, I would move out of LA and find the spot. I mean, we went everywhere. We lived awhile in Costa Rica until I realized some things in the jungle—snakes and frogs—can kill a child. Then we went to New Zealand, Australia, Ireland. But after Willie Nelson, who has a house here, introduced me to the wonders of Maui, I've been here ever since. PLAYBOY: Describe a typical day in paradise. HARRELSON: No two days are ever alike. Some mornings I'll get up, do yoga, go for a swim, go out to the garden. We grow all kinds of fruits and vegetables, so we're mostly eating off our own land. Lately I've been doing a ton of kite-boarding. Other days I'll take the girls [Harrelson and wife Laura Louie, his former assistant, have three daughters—Deni, 16, Zoe, 13, and Makani, three] and go find a waterfall. I like to relax and do nothing. An excellent day is when I get to pet the dog for half an hour without interruption. Oh and lots of time with friends and lots of movies. We don't have a TV, but we have one of those cheap projectors, and we put a sheet up on the wall. It's like you're in your own theater. I never could get my head around living in Los Angeles, and Maui is like a reality check for me. People have a false image of the Hollywood lifestyle, and I def­initely fell for it. It's the image of a crazy, fun, money-and-sex-saturated existence you think will somehow bring happiness, but that's not the case. PLAYBOY: So you mean to say that money can't buy happiness? HARRELSON: Listen, I have a photo from when I first moved to Los Angeles. I guess it was when I started doing Cheers. I had just turned 24 and was living in corporate hous­ing in the San Fernando Valley because it was close to Warner Bros. My brother took a picture of me in a Jacuzzi, holding a bottle

of champagne and a joint, and 1 think there was a bunch of money lying around. All this materialistic imagery because that's what we thought life was about—drugs, money, sex. Soon enough I was living that life for real. A mobile party, a whirlwind. Chasing girls, limos, groupies. My buddy Michael J. Fox used to call it the circus, and that's what it was, but 1 think 1 needed to experience that extreme hedonism to show me the truth. Like the quote goes, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. PLAYBOY: Any regrets? HARRELSON: I don't have any regrets, no. Well, fuck, I have tons of regrets, but I was a kid. I was an adult, but I was still a kid. When you're famous you can remain a kid for as long as you want. Everybody's giving you what you want all the time, everywhere you go. Why say no? It's the sugar wheel. You just want more and more because it tastes good, it looks good, it feels fucking unbelievable. John Lennon once summed it up in a word: Satyricon. PLAYBOY: And the problem would be? HARRELSON: [Laughs] No problem. Hey, I did have a frickin' ball! Loved it! Had some fan-fucking-tastic unbelievable times that any young man would trade his life for. You honestly wouldn't believe it if I told you. But I feel I wasted something. I mean... you take those hours—not to mention the money—I spent and apply it toward some­thing meaningful. Christ, I could've learned 12 languages! I could've learned several martial arts. I mean mastered. I could've become an engineer and still had time to study acupuncture and the guitar, the flute and the ukulele. I had a good fucking time, but did it help me or anyone around me? PLAYBOY: Just for oral history purposes, please share one standout moment from those circus days. What's one of the wilder scenes that springs to mind? HARRELSON: Well, I don't know. It was a long time ago, and I'm a father now. This will be on the public record, and my kids might read this someday. Put a little bookmark on that topic, and come back to it later. PLAYBOY: Fair enough. Let's talk about The Messenger. People are saying great things about that movie. HARRELSON: I think I may be prouder of that one than anything I've been associated with. The main character is a guy just back from Iraq who gets put together with my char­acter in what they call the Angels of Death squadron. We're the guys who notify the next of kin if someone dies. Toughest job in the Army. What's so heartbreaking is the emotional toll this task takes on the officers. Usually you think about the families, but this is the untold story of these casualty-notifica­tion officers. It's a very touching and pow­erful project, and what's interesting is that it's a war movie completely set in America. PLAYBOY: How are you feeling generally about America these days? HARRELSON: [Sighs arui laughs] Yeah, America the beautiful. I would compare America right now to that person who says, "Oh yeah, I'm definitely going to change! I'm

going to start exercising. Gonna do heaw shakes in the morning and then Til jump on the trampoline ;ind meditate afterward." You know? There's a great level of aware­ness now that change needs to happen fast, but we need to see actual change. It's nice to have one of our own in the White House— a Hawaiian, I mean—and also a man of integrity. But to be a truly great president, he needs to implement real fixes in Iraq, in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo, on the economy. My feeling is there's never been a president who didn't bend to the will of corporate America. Our society is built on all these industries that are raping Mother Earth daily. They've been getting huge sub­sidies—billions and billions of dollars every year—to continue these atrocities. Can Obama be the first to stand up to them? We'll see. I'd like to see it happen. PLAYBOY: Have you and President Obama compared Hawaii notes? HARRELSON: |ust before he was president, I met him on Oahu. He caught me off guard because he said, "You just come over from Maui?" It put me on my heels. I said, "How did you...," and he goes, "Well, I met Willie Nelson once, and he invited me onto his bus, and it was reeking at the time, if you know what I mean." He was so funny about it. I started laughing. "Anyway, Willie told me, 'If you ever come to Maui, let's go golfing with my buddy Woody.'" He remembered that. I said, "Well, you really should, man." And he laughed and said, "Oh, I think that might get me in trouble." [laughs] He's a genuine guy, Obama. At least I hope he is. What we need in our society is a radical change. We have to get off the dinosaur lit. PLAYBOY: Interesting choice of words. HARRELSON: We have to change our anti­quated mind-set as a society. To me the most egregious of all man's activities, after these stupid fucking oil wars, is mountain-top removal. Talk about corporate greed! Mining companies used to drill to find a vein and then extract. Now? They freaking blow the top off the mountain! The biggest machines you've ever seen then come along, dig up the earth and pull it out. Glorious mountains go from this [makes the sign of a mountain peak] to that, [makes the sign of flat land] And everything around—the streams, the soil—gets loaded with all kinds of toxic chemicals and metals and nasty shit. This is particularly in Appalachia. Hundreds of mountains have been removed, and thou­sands of small communities are affected. It's an atrocity, and nobody's doing anything about it. Bobby Kennedy Jr. and I are work­ing on a film about it now. PLAYBOY: You talk a lot about corporate greed, but do you ever feel a conflict working for giant corporations as an actor? Your other big new movie, 2012, is a gargantuan Sony product. HARRELSON: Yeah, there's definitely a con­flict, though I don't look at Sony as a terri­ble corporation the way, for example, Fox is. Fox is bad news. I do not like Rupert Murdoch. He's like Goebbels, Hitler's

propaganda guy. Murdoch is waving the flag not because he gives a shit about it but because he just wants to make money. It seems to be tried and true for him, though now I guess his empire's taken a bit of a hit. But you're right. I have to figure out how to balance all that. I try, though. I see people do commercials I think are abso­lutely immoral. I mean, an athlete doing a McDonald's commercial? Come on! You're going to pretend this is good solid fuel here? I know it's hard. I want to walk my talk as much as possible, but I confess to being a hypocrite in a number of ways. PLAYBOY: If you met the man you are now when you were a teenager, what would vou think of yourself? HARRELSON: Whoa, heavy. [Imtghs] It's inter­esting. I definitely would have thought I'm a sinner and I probably am not going to heaven, [laughs] I was so religious in a really judgmental way. The church was everything to me growing up. PLAYBOY: You were a true believer. HARRELSON: The truest. You gotta be. Reli­gion was drilled into my head for so long. I can remember being around 20 years old, working construction in Urbana, Ohio at the time, and I asked my aunt if I could

go and stay with these girls I knew. She said, "Well, just make sure to talk to them about the Lord and don't spend the night with them." And I said, "Oh absolutely." Probably in the back of my mind—or in the front—I'm thinking, I definitely want to hang out with these girls all night. PLAYBOY: Did they break you down? HARRELSON: No, I went over and started preaching to them, [laughs] They just wanted me to let it go. I can remember them shaking their heads like / was the lost soul, and of course I was. Back then I had massive guilt about every part of sex—lust, masturbation, all of it. It's like Larry Flynt says, the church gets its hand on your sexual apparatus and the next thing you know they're in control. It's all a quest to make us feel guilty about what can be the greatest thing. It's a shame so many people grow up with that kind of guilt. playboy: How did you get past it? HARRELSON: Who said I got past it? [laughs] "Honey, let's turn off the lights. I don't want to see your body naked." Can you imagine? I did turn a corner, though I might have been a good minister had I stayed at it. I was getting into theology and studying the roots of the Bible, but then I started to dis-

cover the man-made nature of it. I started seeing things that made me ask, "Is God really speaking through this instrument?" PLAYBOY: Versus someone making it all up? HARRELSON: Yeah, and making it up for the worst reasons—so that wives would be more devoted to their husbands, things like that. My eyes opened to the reality of the Bible being just a document to control people. At the time I was a real mama's boy and deeply mesmerized by the church. I didn't smoke or drink or anything. PLAYBOY: And a virgin, of course. HARRELSON: I didn't say I was without sin. [laughs] I lost my virginity when I was 17. I'd been exchanging letters with a girl at a church camp in Ohio and somehow con­cluded she was the one willing female soul on planet Earth, so I drove out to see her in a purple Gremlin. I kid you not. We took a walk to find a secluded place and ended up in a hayloft. Neither of us knew what we were doing, but we went at it feverishly— until her parents showed up, with doors opening, bright lights, them screaming, me stuffing my underwear and her bra down the back of my pants. "We weren't doing nothing," she told her dad. "Oh, yeah? Then why is your shirt on inside out?" A couple of

years later 1 started distancing myself from all that religion-based morality, and my eyes opened to a superhighway of possibilities. At the age of 21 or 22 it hit me that I didn't need to be guided by these rigid morals. The u'ming couldn't have been better. PLAYBOY: Cheers. HARRELSON: Thank you. PLAYBOY: No, we mean that's just before Cheers started. But how did you go from Jesus camp to Hollywood? HARRELSON: I did a play at church when I was a junior in high school. I played a drunk in a nativity scene. Great fun. Then 1 did more in college and was awestruck by how a litde change in your voice or demeanor onstage could get a massive reaction from an audience. It was thrilling enough to get me to move to New York to really make a go of it. But things didn't go as well as I'd hoped. I had 17 jobs my first year and couldn't get an agent or acting work. Severe depression sank in, and I slept all day. One afternoon a roommate of mine burst in and said, "Get the fuck out of bed. Some agent is on the phone." The agent told me, "1 saw something in your face. Will you come in and meet with me?" She ended up being my agent for years and was the one who got me the Cheers audition, not that I knew it was an audition at the moment. The day I had my meeting with the producers was before I learned I should give up dairy. I'm lactose intolerant, you see, and I was very mucousy that day. At the audition I was brought through a series of doors until I got to the room where all the decision mak­ers were. I didn't know who they were, so I just stood there blowing my nose. The whole place starts laughing, and I start laughing too, but that only makes me have to blow my nose even more. I had no idea the director, Jimmy Burrows, and the other producers were the guys laughing. For some reason they said, "Yeah, this is the guy to play Woody Boyd." I had 24 hours to decide whether to move my whole life from New York to L.A. Everybody in New York told me to do it, and I damn well did it. PLAYBOY: What were those first years in Los Angeles like?

HARRELSON: Outrageous as shit. God, it was fun. First of all, going to work with those guys—Ted Danson and everybody else—was like going to the playground every damn day. And you have to remem­ber that was a time when audiences actu­ally gathered to watch TV. It wasn't like now, when you have a million distractions. Television sitcoms were something people would plan their schedule around. Very quickly I'd be places, and total strangers would behave as though they knew me. There was a situation once when being famous actually saved my life. PLAYBOY: How so?

HARRELSON: Well, this was years later, but I was in Dubrovnik, Croatia, not long after the Bosnian war. I was on the beach with a couple of girls I knew, just me and them, swimming. I can remember one of them said something, and I laughed. I some-

times have this tendency to have a kind of high-spirited girlish laugh. 1 heard some­one mocking me, so I started mocking back. They mock, I mock. Pretty soon these guys were coming down from the hillside. They were the toughest-looking motherfuckers you ever saw. Some kind of Croatian judo gang or something, and they were com­ing down basically to kill me for being with these red-hot girls. They were ready to tear me apart, and it got mind-blowingly tense. But then one of those fucking guys recog­nizes me from American TV, so we end up going out for drinks with them instead. I swear if I hadn't been on Cheers, I'd have died right there on that beach in Croatia. PLAYBOY: So there you go. Being famous rocks! HARRELSON: Most of the time, but it was very stressful at first. You go from nobody paying attention to everybody telling you "You're great, you're great. I love you." It doesn't matter whether they mean it or not. You believe it. At one point I had kind of a nervous breakdown. I had just finished with Cheers and was in the middle of doing a play, starting to do press for Indecent Pro­posal and going straight into Natural Born Killers, which was its own special kind of insanity. Fifty-six of the craziest working days of my life. All of it was messed up. I remember I had to shave my head, and I had just started to sink into the character. Very dark. I remember walking into the Joliet prison where we were shooting, and these guys would scream at me—killers!— and I'd scream back at them, "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" I mean it was weird, man. Around that time I just remember los­ing it. Just crying and crying all the time and thinking, I can't go on. But I pushed myself through and managed to come out the other side. I think it's important to wal­low in your depression sometimes. People rush to get on these meds, make themselves happy. I've faced depression several times in my life, and while it's never enjoyable, I do think it serves its purpose. You need your bad memories and your good memo­ries to make you a complete person. PLAYBOY: How's your memory these days? HARRELSON: Long term's okay. Short term? What was the question again? [laughs] playboy: Any roles you regret turning down over the years? HARRELSON: There have been a few, defi­nitely. Jerry Maguire would have been interesting. I kicked myself for years after not taking that one. But one road leads to another, and I wouldn't be the same guy if I'd said yes to everything. You learn as you go. PLAYBOY: What did you learn from your hedonistic circus period? HARRELSON: You won't drop this, will you? All right, since this is playboy I'll share one or two images, if only to illustrate how super­ficial we are as a society. At one point I was involved in.. .let's just say I was hanging with three amazing gals, each one more amaz­ing and beautiful than the next. We met at some type of Hollywood party. The music was jamming, and I just kind of walked up and put my arm around one of them but

said to all three, "I have a dream." Just say­ing it made them laugh, and two hours later we were back at my place having the most fun one man can have in a sexual capacity with three of the most phenomenal-looking women you could imagine. PLAYBOY: Whoa.

HARRELSON: Whoa is right. .And it went on and on. Other nights, other women. I was monumentally lucky. Girls would come up to me in bars and say, "You want to take a walk on the wild side?" And we"d just go into the bathroom. Crazy shit. But here's the thing, and it's hard to comprehend if you're outside looking in, but the truth is it was kind of meaningless. First of all, it wouldn't have happened if I wasn't famous. Mr. Joe Schmo walking up to these three girls just wouldn't work. But I'm the guy from Cheers or Natural Bom Killers or Larry Flynt. and suddenly I'm some great Casanova. PLAYBOY: What did you learn about how life really works?

HARRELSON: Great flicking question. First of all, you're never going to get real fulfillment from sexual or monetary pursuits. That's part of the reason I'm reluctant to revel in my glory days, so to speak. If we didn't have the tape recorder on, I still wouldn't revel, because it was just a vain pursuit. It's not bad. I don't have any negative judgment. I'm very happy with everything that hap­pened, but my head space is so different now. PLAYBOY: You finally married your longtime partner, Laura Louie, last year after being with her lor 20 years. What took you so long? HARRELSON: I guess you can never be too sure. [Itmgh.s] But marriage and monog­amy in general are kind of interesting. If you look at animals, some mate for life and some don't. Dogs and dolphins don't seem to think much about monogamy, and I've always tended to side with them. I'm kind of torn on it. I never thought monogamy should be the rule. I always thought it was just an absurdity. It creates these hard boundaries that ultimately become more important than even.... [pauses] It's weird. A guy could go out and sleep with another woman and come home, and his wife could chop his balls off, kill him, so to speak, and it would seem justified. Meanwhile that same guy could go out and murder three people, come back and she'll take him and find a place to hide him and bring him food. It's just weird how the mentality of monogamy is that pervasive. It's the subject of every talk show, every movie, every song. The heart­break, the betrayal. But it's been destruc­tive because it's such a rigid construction, and that rigidity makes you want to stray. PLAYBOY: How have you dealt with it? HARRELSON: [Laughs] PLAYBOY: It's been a struggle? HARRELSON: I don't know. Like I say, philo­sophically I've always thought of monogamy as an absurd idea, but honestly, right now in my life I don't know what I think. I don't know what's right, and I don't know what's wrong. I just know that I want Laura to be happy, and I want us to have a happy family. PLAYBOY: And how do you feel?

HARRELSON: Well, I think in my life I've cer­tainly allowed myself a lot in terms of my physical proclivities. I've had the kind of life you could just say, "What a lucky guy," purely on that level, you know? It's like I've had my quota. Paul McCartney has a song on his album Off the Ground with the line, "Best thing I ever saw was a man who loved his wife." I love the album, and I remem­ber puzzling over that. It's one of those lines that he probably wrote in a second, but it just stayed in my head. I really came to feel the truth of that. Me loving Laura as much as I do has led to all the greatest things in my life. Laura's an amazing gal. Regarding my wavering and adolescent behavior, she's been incredible. Like in London a few years ago, when it came out in the news that I had an experience with three girls. PLAYBOY: The three girls you were talk­ing about?

HARRELSON: [Laughs] No, three different girls. It seems my downfall is multiples. Again, a wild, wild time, but it turned out one of the girls was connected to the paparazzi. Next thing you know, there's a three-page spread in some tabloid. Well, Laura heard about it, and you know what she said to me? She said, "I can't imag­ine how hard it is for you to have to deal with that kind of thing." She immediately went to compassion for me, as opposed to how almost any other woman would have reacted, with outrage and screaming. That's the component of her nature I find so tran­scendent. It transcends what's going on in the world and everything she's supposed to be. I've learned that's what love means on its deepest level. I've been around die corner, and I've met many great gals, but I would say Laura is a genuine goddess. Compas­sionate, understanding, beautiful. It's just overwhelming, {pauses to smoke marijuana] PLAYBOY: Do you think you could live sober? HARRELSON: I experience sobriety every day. Long chunks of it. [laughs] Never is a long time. I admire that straight-edge philosophy, and the times I've experi­enced sobriety for extended lengths of time have been very rewarding. But don't presume I'm always fucked-up, because I'm not. Certainly when I'm working I'm very focused and very un-fucked-up. PLAYBOY: Do you think pot will be legal in the U.S. in 10 years? HARRELSON: Well, if the will of the people was able to express itself through politics, then of course it would be. But seeing how mat's rarely the case, and it's really the will of cor­porations that drives our society, the war on drugs will continue. It's a big fucking money­maker. Billions and billions of dollars a year go into fighting drugs, and that keeps many, many people employed. You also have to include incarceration in that. So much atten­tion is focused on pot because it's a drug that makes you think outside the box. It's a drug that gets you to start questioning authority, and the state doesn't want that out there.

We call ourselves a free country, but America legislates morality. The federal government was designed both to protect

us against toreign enemies ana to Help in terms of commerce between the states. Now it's way out of bounds. It may make a hell of a lot of sense for me to put on my seat belt when I'm driving down the road, but if I choose not to, that should be my prerogative. Just like it should be my choice whether I want to wear my helmet on my motorcycle or not. The logic of keeping marijuana illegal is that it will keep people from using it. Guess what. People are using it anyway. It's just like Prohibition. There were alcoholics before Prohibition, during Prohibition and after. But legalizing alcohol took away a lot of the violence that sprung up because it had to be locked away before diat. I think people are smart, and I think people in a country ought to make their own decisions. As long as I don't hurt you or your property, I should be allowed to do what I want. Since that's not the case, we have a lot of people sitting in prison, serv­ing time for victimless crimes. playboy: What did it mean for you to see your father die in prison? HARRELSON: [Pauses] Well, that was dif­ficult. That was very difficult. I was never convinced he committed the crimes he

was accused of committing, and I always thought somehow I'd get him out. The government had a long history of wrong­doing, I think, in his case. And like a lot of other atrocities, they got away with it. On the other hand my dad was no saint, so I don't know. I think I reached a level of not judging him for certain things I might judge your average person for. Above all, I really did love him. I thought he was an extraordinary guy, a brilliant guy, actually. PLAYBOY: He must have been very proud of you and the work you've done. HARRELSON: It's interesting. They used to have a TV in prison, and every night the guys would make a group decision on what to watch. Dad would vote for Cheers every night, and he'd always get voted down. They would watch baseball or whatever. You see, my dad didn't talk about who his son was, but eventually someone figured it out, and once word got around, Cheers would be on that TV every single night. PLAYBOY: He went to jail for the first time when you were seven. Did you grow up resenting him for not being around? HARRELSON: [Pauses, turns frosty] Look, I guess I was resentful about certain things.

would have liked my dad around to sit ind talk like this or to go hiking with or to he movies. My mom and I had a ven dose elationship, to the point where I was prob-ibly too good a boy growing up and could lave used my dad around to show me how

0 expand my horizons a bit. That's not to ay he didn't influence me. I feel him inside ne. They say in Japan that when you're >orn on your father's birth date, as 1 was. hat you are your father. I certainly think ibout that. Certain habits I have, certain endencies, definitely came from him. •LAYBOY: Is violence an issue for you? luu recently got into a scuffle with

1 TMZ photographer and ended up ireaking the guy's camera. HARRELSON: [Grumbles] Yeah, well, I think ill men have violence inside them, and I've .ertainly had my issues with anger manage-nenl or the lack of anger management. But [ found an outlet, a way to handle it. Mostly hat's through acting, though at times it ;rupts like that. Yoga and meditation help. 'LAYBOY: Incidentally, what was the deal A'ith your official explanation that zom-jies made you do it?

HARRELSON: Oh, that was Paul's idea. I lad just come from the airport in New York after this TMZ situation and was feei­ng awful about it, and I ran into Sir Paul McCartney. We've been friends for a long lime through our shared passion for vegan-ism and many other issues. He's got such a jreat capacity for happiness. Anyway, I told him what happened and also that I'd just finished this movie called Zombxeland, and Paul said, "That's it, man! Just tell the press you thought the cameraman was a zom­bie." So that's what we went with, [laughs but suddenly turns serious] But getting back to your question about whether I resented my lather. The thing with him was he couldn't figure out a way to control his behavior, and that's what I most regret, more than resent, in his case. He had a chance to turn his life around, but he couldn't manage it. 1 remember he was released from prison at one point, and he came up to visit me at college. Drove up in this great big Lin­coln Continental. I thought to myself, Maybe now he'll have die life he wants and turn things around. But sure enough, he landed back in prison, and that's where he remained. Sad, sad story, [pauses] I think he really struggled with life and made some colossal mistakes. But I also think the U.S. government committed some atrocities in his case and did things to him that were completely and utterly unfair. PLAYBOY: Like...? [Harrelson looks away, remains silent and motionless for four minutes •ind 27 seconds.]

HARRELSON: [Brightens, smiles] Hey, how's il going?

PLAYBOY: Not bad. How are you? HARRELSON: [Laughs] Good, good. What else do you want to talk about? PLAYBOY: Um, got it. Let's see. We hear you do a mean Elvis impression. HARRELSON: [Singing 'AllShook Up,"sounding (concluded on page 110)

HARRELSON

(continued from page 46) exactly like Ekis] "A well I, bless my soul/What's wrong with me?/I'm itching like a man on a fuzzy tree...." Just after Elvis died, I sent away and got one of his records—Elvis' Golden Records, I think it was called. I used to sing songs from it in high school, and soon enough people started saying, "Do your Elvis." I remember doing it one time in the school library. I started off qui-edy, but pretty soon people were gathering around and clapping, and I'm getting louder, and pretty soon the whole library's gathered around clapping along widi it. PLAYBOY: How old were you? HARRELSON: About 16. And then I jump up on the table and finish it, and even the librarians are cheering! It was just before Christmas, a time that's festive. It was a good diing I did that because Robin came over afterward. She was this gorgeous sophomore who went out with this senior from the football team. Anyway, she came up and said, "Did you ever think about joining the theater?" She worked in the theater club or whatever. I had never even thought about acting, but since Robin was acting, I said, "Well, maybe so." Next thing I knew I was act­ing and going out with Robin. PLAYBOY: It's funny how one person can change your whole life. HARRELSON: So true. Or changing one habit. I remember when I stopped drinking Coke and started drinking Sprite because I thought that looked clearer and cleaner. It was just a mental thing, but it started my

evolution toward a healthier lilestyle. Soon it was, "I don't do soda pop." That simple shift in diet, in controlling what 1 ate, gave me more energy. From there everything shifted in terms of being easier. That led me to think of other ways to increase energy, and soon I tried veganism. Not out of compassion for animals at first—that came later—but because of how good it made me feel. Before I knew it my whole diet had changed. But it all started with one small step—not drinking Coke. PLAYBOY: Do you worry about aging? You're nearing 50.

HARRELSON: I feel the approach, that's for sure. It seems like once you get to a certain age, people constantly want to tell you how old you are. Especially people who have that blessed gift of youth. "Oh, I wasn't even born when you did White Men Can't Jump" or what­ever. But I remember being 21 and thinking how old 30 was. Forty was grandpa territory. The other night I went to the graduation party of a kid we've known since he was six. I met a lot of his high school classmates, and they were just great. I ended up challenging the class champions at a game of beer pong. PLAYBOY: Did you play Maui rules? HARRELSON: No, it was pretty standard. You get six cups in pyramid formation and try to get a Ping-Pong ball into a cup. If you sink it in their cup, they drink. We were undefeated through the night. It was incredible. Finally I had to crawl into bed at four in the morning. But I was up bright and early doing hard-core yoga, which cures any hangover. PLAYBOY: We noticed a yoga swing over your

ixii. is yoga ncipiui in uiai ucpaiuiiem. luor HARRELSON: Yoga is the best thing for vour sex life! It keeps you limber in all kinds of ways. It teaches you to love your body and vour partner's body. But more than anything, it keeps your mind liquid, and nothing's sexier than that. Mind and body open to possibili­ties. I read this quote from Bruce Lee, one of the greatest quotes ever. He said. "Be water." We can become so rigid in our beliefs, in our thinking, and I think yoga is a great way to force you outside of your mental and physical rigidity. My mind was rigid growing up, as I've explained, but so was my body. Super ught. Yoga started curing the chronic pain I had, but it also released my mind along with it.

In many ways I feel I'm battling to stay liquid, to be like water. I don't want to be a superficial guy, you know? I want to get out from under all the superficiality of our culture and live free of the strictures our society places on us. I want to be a sensory person but not be controlled by the senses. I want to live a spiritual life but not be con­trolled by religion. I want to live free but also devote myself to family and the love of the great woman I share my life with.

What's great is that for the first time I'm find­ing that balance. I still have a long way to go in some areas, but that's part of what keeps things interesting—figuring it all out. But in general, man, I wake up every morning asking, "What the fuck did I do in my last life to deserve the amazing fucking life I got in this one?"

I started distancing myself from all that religion-based morality, and my eyes opened

to a superhighway of possibilities. I didn't need to be guided by these rigid morals.