Woody Harrelson on work and weed
Woody, I think you ought to lay off. How many have you had? Eleven. Eleven beers? Eleven sips. It's Sunday morning on CBS, and here again is Lee Cowan. That's the Woody Harrelson we all came to know, as the beloved, if befuddled, barkeep in the hit TV series Cheers. This morning, he's in conversation with our Ben Mankewicz, talking about passions, new and old. So, Ben, what we have here is a lot of marijuana.
That's what this is. It likely doesn't come as a surprise. And this is more like smokable stuff. That Woody Harrelson is a weed fan. It's just a little dream of what a great dispensary could be. At the woods, the cannabis dispensary he co-owns in West Hollywood, his dream has come true. A lush and welcoming space complete with a koi pond and macaws.
There's some macaws here and over here. It is not a place young Woody Harrelson raised in a deeply religious Presbyterian household in rural Ohio by his mother ever expected to be, let alone own. She'd be sitting there. She'd have her coffee and cigarette and everything in the morning. You know, she'd be like, son, if I ever hear that you're smoking marijuana, it'll just kill me. And, uh. Woody, this way! Now 61 years old, Harrelson's day job remains the same.
He's spent the last 38 years yo-yoing back and forth between TV and movies, comedy and drama, versatility is his calling card. I've always been much more partial to the more indie spirit, you know, the movies that have this kind of deep heart, you know, and this movie definitely has heart. This movie is Champions, out next month. Harrelson plays a prickly but charming basketball coach with NBA Dreams, who finds himself coaching a team of players with intellectual disabilities called the Friends. Welcome to the team, Cosantina. What's with the boogie board? You do you, I do me, okay? Where do you got this guy? He just showed up one day. Before the first day shooting, director Bobby Farrelly, who Harrelson first worked with 27 years ago on Kingpin, told him the first scene he'd shoot, when his character meets the team for the first time.
My name is Marcus.would be almost entirely improv. Basketball coach for the next three months. Nope. To just throw things out and see how it goes, it just kind of freaked me. I didn't sleep. Then I went in there, I meet these guys, and they are just awesome.
I'm Johnny. I'm your homie with an extra qualmi. I just had the best. I love them. They're just all incredible people, and just phenomenal senses of humor, which really comes through. Harrelson's sense of humor has been on display.since he made his screen debut on the fourth season of Cheers in 1985.
What do you think? You want to give him a try? Me? Mr. Malone, this is the proudest day of my life. But it's the laugh he got one day in his high school library that hooked him on show business. The guys from the football team, you know, who had heard me do it before, they're like, What do you want? Do your Elvis. I'm like, I'm kidding me, this place is packed, I can't do my Elvis. But just do it quiet. They convinced me, and so I'm like, I start off kind of soft.
Well, bless my soul, what's wrong with me? I'm like a man on a fuzzy tree. And before you know it, I'm in the middle of a circle of the entire library, including the librarian, has gathered around and they're like clapping. And at the end of it, it was unbelievable. Like everybody was applauding. And the feeling of that, like they say that feeling that you get from that applause, that's what makes you say this is it. He's been at it ever since. He studied theater in college, though after getting his big break, he wasn't sure there was life after Cheers.
I thought that was just gonna be my career because six years in I hadn't done any other part. And back then it was much harder to jump off a television in the movies. Now it's kind of an open door both directions. He's gone through that revolving door multiple times from TV to movies and back again. Along the way, there have been a couple of whiffs. You turn stuff down a lot, right? Or you have. Well, I should.
No, I don't think you should. No, I do. Jerry McGuire? Yeah, yeah, that was, that was a blunder. And then like two days later, I hear Tom Cruise is doing it. And I'm like, oh, what the? Oh, I might have. There haven't been many mistakes. He has an Emmy for Cheers, three Oscar nominations and a film he made last year, Triangle of Sadness is nominated for Best Picture.
When he's not working, the father of three girls lives in Maui and Texas with his wife, Laura. We call this the treehouse. But wherever he is, he always seems to be in Woodyville. You're a vegan, you're an environmentalist, you're a cannabis advocate, but you seem to know, you don't want to bully other people into your ways of thinking, even though you feel passionate about it. Well, I never noticed that preaching works. Like me trying to tell someone, don't eat that cheese has never, ever worked. What works for Woody changes.
For a while, a few years back, he even gave up weed. I want it to be emotionally available. To your family? To my family, to my friends. It's a good experiment. His longtime pal and fellow toker Willie Nelson brought that experiment to an end at one of their regular poker games. Willie would always act like he didn't know that I quit. You know what I'm saying? For like the fifth time that day, I quit, you know? When he's like, oh, oh, oh.
I win a big hand. He hands it right to me, and I just grab it and I take a big toke, and he goes, welcome home son. Welcome home son. Because I gotta say, even when basically I came out of the closet on the herb thing, it was not a happy, frolicy, fun response. Do you think it hurt your career for a bit? I don't think it helped. That was 25 or so years ago. In 2023, the world has finally caught up to Woody Harrell's.
People are just anxious to put you in a little box in this industry, you know? So I'm the year of the ox. You know, just slowly I tread you along. I'm not the fastest animal out there, but I keep going.
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