78 Facts About Woody Harrelson

1.

Woodrow Tracy Harrelson was born on July 23,1961 and is an American actor and playwright.

2.

Woody Harrelson is the recipient of various accolades, including a Primetime Emmy Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards, in addition to nominations for three Academy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards.

3.

Woody Harrelson reprised his role in the acclaimed spinoff series Frasier for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series nomination.

4.

Woody Harrelson went on to receive three Academy Award nominations: Best Actor for The People vs Larry Flynt, and Best Supporting Actor for both The Messenger and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

5.

Woody Harrelson gained prominence for his portrayal of Haymitch Abernathy in The Hunger Games film series.

6.

Woody Harrelson received further Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie for his portrayal of Steve Schmidt in the HBO film Game Change, and for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his role as Marty Hart in the HBO crime anthology series True Detective.

7.

Woody Harrelson portrays E Howard Hunt in the HBO political limited series White House Plumbers.

8.

Woodrow Tracy Woody Harrelson was born in Midland, Texas, on July 23,1961, to secretary Diane and convicted hitman Charles Voyde Woody Harrelson.

9.

Woody Harrelson was raised in a Presbyterian household alongside his two brothers, Jordan and Brett, the latter of whom became an actor.

10.

Woody Harrelson has stated that his father was rarely around during his childhood.

11.

Woody Harrelson's family was poor and relied on his mother's wages.

12.

Woody Harrelson spent the summer of 1979 working at Kings Island amusement park.

13.

Woody Harrelson attended Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana, where he studied theater and English.

14.

Woody Harrelson is widely known for his work on the NBC sitcom Cheers.

15.

Woody Harrelson played bartender Woody Boyd, who replaced Coach.

16.

Woody Harrelson joined the cast in 1985 in season four, spending the final eight seasons on the show.

17.

Woody Harrelson was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for this performance.

18.

Woody Harrelson returned to television in 2014, starring along with Matthew McConaughey in the first season of the HBO crime series True Detective, where he played Marty Hart, a Louisiana cop investigating murders that took place over a timespan of 17 years.

19.

On June 6,2010, Woody Harrelson took part playing in Soccer Aid 2010 for UNICEF UK at Old Trafford in Manchester.

20.

Woody Harrelson took part in Soccer Aid 2012 on May 27,2012.

21.

Woody Harrelson followed his performance in Wildcats with the 1990 romantic comedy Cool Blue, alongside Hank Azaria.

22.

Woody Harrelson reunited with Wesley Snipes in the box-office hit White Men Can't Jump and the action movie Money Train.

23.

In 1993, Woody Harrelson starred opposite Robert Redford and Demi Moore in the drama Indecent Proposal, which was a box office success, earning a worldwide total of over $265,000,000.

24.

Woody Harrelson then played Mickey Knox in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and Dr Michael Raynolds in the Michael Cimino film The Sunchaser.

25.

Woody Harrelson's career gained momentum when he starred in the Milos Forman film The People vs Larry Flynt, in which he played Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine.

26.

The film was a success and Woody Harrelson's performance was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award for Best Actor.

27.

Woody Harrelson starred in the 1997 war film Welcome to Sarajevo and in 1997 had a featured role as Sergeant Schumann in Wag the Dog and as Will Huffman in the 1997 family film Road to Manhattan.

28.

In 1998, Woody Harrelson starred in the thriller Palmetto and played Sergeant Keck in The Thin Red Line, a war film nominated for seven Academy Awards in 1999.

29.

Woody Harrelson made other films such as The Hi-Lo Country and portrayed Ray Pekurny in the comedy EDtv.

30.

Woody Harrelson did not appear in films again until 2003, when he co-starred as Galaxia in the comedy film Anger Management.

31.

Woody Harrelson appeared in the action film After the Sunset and the Spike Lee film She Hate Me.

32.

In 2005, Woody Harrelson was in The Big White and North Country.

33.

Woody Harrelson made two films in 2006, the animated film version of Free Jimmy and A Scanner Darkly.

34.

Woody Harrelson won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Cast, along with Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, and Kelly Macdonald.

35.

In 2007's Battle in Seattle, Woody Harrelson played another key role of a Seattle police officer whose pregnant wife loses her baby during the 1999 World Trade Organization protests.

36.

In 2008, Woody Harrelson appeared in several films, among them the Will Ferrell basketball comedy Semi-Pro and the stark Will Smith drama Seven Pounds as a blind vegan meat salesman named Ezra Turner.

37.

In 2009, Woody Harrelson received significant praise for his performance as Captain Tony Stone in The Messenger.

38.

In what many critics considered to be his best role, Woody Harrelson was nominated for a Satellite Award, an Independent Spirit Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

39.

Woody Harrelson has won the Best Supporting Actor award in the 2009 National Board of Review award ceremonies and received accolades from various critics' societies.

40.

Also that same year, Woody Harrelson co-starred in the horror comedy Zombieland, followed by Roland Emmerich's 2012, where he played Charlie Frost, a man who warns of the end of the world.

41.

Woody Harrelson narrated the 2011 film ETHOS, which explores the idea of a self-destructing modern society, governed by unequal power and failed democratic ideals.

42.

Woody Harrelson played Haymitch Abernathy in 2012's The Hunger Games, and reprised the role in all three subsequent films in the series.

43.

The AMA turned into a PR disaster when Woody Harrelson failed to make meaningful responses to any questions and soon specifically refused to respond to anything not directly related to the then-upcoming worldwide release of the movie Rampart, in which he starred.

44.

Woody Harrelson played police chief Bill Willoughby in the black comedy crime film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, released in 2017, for which he received nominations for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role.

45.

In 2018, Woody Harrelson played Tobias Beckett, a criminal and Han Solo's mentor in Lucasfilm's Solo: A Star Wars Story.

46.

In 2018, Woody Harrelson appeared in a cameo at the end of the film Venom, portraying Cletus Kasady, and he reprised the role as the main antagonist, voicing the symbiote Carnage who joins with Kasady, in the 2021 sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

47.

In 1999, Woody Harrelson directed his own play, Furthest from the Sun, at the Theatre de la Jeune Lune in Minneapolis.

48.

Woody Harrelson followed next in Roundabout's Broadway revival of the N Richard Nash play The Rainmaker in 2000, Sam Shepard's The Late Henry Moss in 2001, John Kolvenbach's On an Average Day opposite Kyle MacLachlan in London's West End in the fall of 2002, and in the summer of 2003, Harrelson directed the Toronto premiere of Kenneth Lonergan's This is Our Youth at the Berkley Street Theater.

49.

Woody Harrelson directed Bullet for Adolf at the esteemed Hart House Theatre in Toronto, Ontario, which ran from April 21 to May 7,2011.

50.

In 1985, Woody Harrelson married Nancy Simon in Tijuana.

51.

Woody Harrelson was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Hanover College in 2014.

52.

Woody Harrelson made the ceremonial first move for the game.

53.

Woody Harrelson had played the ceremonial first move for the previous World Chess Championship, held in New York in 2016.

54.

In 1999 in Prague, Woody Harrelson, playing White employed the Parham Attack, named after Bernard Parham, to draw World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov.

55.

However, Woody Harrelson was aided by several chess Grandmasters who were in Prague to spectate the chess match between GM Alexei Shirov and GM Judit Polgar.

56.

In 2020, Woody Harrelson was seen practicing Brazilian jiu-jitsu while filming, having received the first stripe on his white belt.

57.

Woody Harrelson was a religious Presbyterian as a child, and studied theology during college.

58.

On June 1,1996, Woody Harrelson was arrested in Lee County, Kentucky, after symbolically planting four hemp seeds to challenge the state law that did not distinguish between industrial hemp and marijuana.

59.

Kilburn and deputy sheriff Danny Towsend arrived at the location where Woody Harrelson informed them he would be.

60.

Woody Harrelson was released on $200 bail the same day.

61.

Woody Harrelson later signed autographs and posed for photos with deputies.

62.

Woody Harrelson was acquitted of those charges with the help of Nunn after just 25 minutes.

63.

In 2002, Woody Harrelson was arrested in London after an incident in a taxi that ended in a police chase.

64.

Woody Harrelson was taken to a London police station and later released on bail.

65.

Woody Harrelson is an enthusiast and supporter of the legalization of marijuana and hemp.

66.

Woody Harrelson was a guest on Ziggy Marley's track "Wild and Free", a song advocating the growing of cannabis.

67.

Since 2003, Woody Harrelson has served as a member on NORML's advisory board.

68.

Woody Harrelson has attended environmental events such as the PICNIC'07 festival that was held in Amsterdam in September 2007.

69.

Woody Harrelson once traveled to the west coast in the US on a bike and a domino caravan with a hemp oil-fueled biodiesel bus with the Spitfire Agency and narrated the 1999 documentary Grass.

70.

Woody Harrelson briefly owned an oxygen bar in West Hollywood called "O2".

71.

In June 2010, Woody Harrelson took part in Soccer Aid at Old Trafford in Manchester to raise money for UNICEF.

72.

Woody Harrelson played for the Rest of the World team alongside former professionals Zinedine Zidane and Luis Figo as well as chef Gordon Ramsay and fellow Hollywood actors Mike Myers and Michael Sheen.

73.

In 2002, Harrelson wrote an article in the British newspaper The Guardian condemning President George W Bush's preparation for a US invasion of Iraq as a "racist and imperialist war".

74.

Woody Harrelson stated that he was against the US's previous war in Iraq and President Bill Clinton's sanctions against Iraq.

75.

In 2013, Woody Harrelson condemned President Barack Obama for failing to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, negatively comparing him to Richard Nixon.

76.

Woody Harrelson's acting credits have earned him global recognition, having garnered him nominations for seven Primetime Emmy Awards, three Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, four Golden Globe Awards, and seven Screen Actors Guild Awards.

77.

On television, his breakthrough role as bartender Woody Harrelson Boyd earned him five Emmy nominations in the category of Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series, with one win.

78.

Woody Harrelson later returned to the small screen with roles in the comedy series Frasier and the 2012 television film Game Change, for which he received two more Emmy nominations: for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series and Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie, respectively.