  Actor Woody Harrelson, nominee for best supporting actor for "The Messenger," arrives at the nominees luncheon for the 82nd annual Academy Awards in Beverly Hills, California Feb. 15, 2010. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni |
Woody Harrelson’s Oscar nomination for The Messenger is not his first such accolade, and it likely won’t be his last.
Whether he wins is beside the point — the point being that Harrelson’s presence in a project always makes it better.
So it is with Defendor, a new film about an unlikely hero, whose crime-fighting ambitions come from comic books. Harrelson, 48, plays Arthur Poppington, a gentle giant of limited intelligence who dresses up as a super-hero and looks for bad guys to battle. Harrelson’s performance is superb; he’s entirely believable in the role.
“I thought Arthur was such an interesting character to play,” said Harrelson, promoting the movie during its premiere last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival. “I felt it was more about playing kid-like, than toning down the intellect, although a lot of my friends would say, what intellect?”
The actor says he studied FAS — fetal alcohol syndrome — to learn more about how Arthur might think and behave. “Before I started, I was freaking, because I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Harrelson described how a meeting with a young man who has FAS helped him to understand.
“It helped me realize I didn’t have to do some weird, quirky, over-the-top thing. And I’m more attracted to — I’m probably, usually a bit over the top. This one, I held back.”
Laughing, he conceded, “It’s kind of fun to chew the scenery. I’ve always been that kind of actor.”
The star of such recent films as Zombieland, No Country For Old Men and Seven Pounds is the kind of actor who found his way from TV’s Cheers to a breakout role in White Men Can’t Jump (1992), and to an Oscar nod for his work in The People vs. Larry Flynt a few years after that. The Texas-born Harrelson is an outspoken advocate of yoga, a vegan lifestyle and hemp, among other things; in the course of conversation he riffed on contemporary art and referred to Natural Born Killers as “that misunderstood romantic comedy.”
He’s kind of a loose cannon, and we mean that in the best possible way.
Asked about how he started acting, the father of three daughters said, “I remember specifically the moment I became an actor,” and he talked about appearing in the Mad Woman Of Chaillot while in college. Competition for roles was intense, but he won a small part as a cop. The lead actor advised him to try something different, anything, to give the role some zip.
“So I rolled up my pant legs, showed the white socks, changed my voice, walked and talked differently,” Harrelson said. He leaped up from his chair and began acting out the scene. “I changed just purely physical things. I did the walk on from upstage, I look at the mad woman, no dialogue, and I walk off. And, ovation! Ovation from the audience!
“All the other actors said, ‘What did you do!?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, but I’m going to do it again tomorrow night.’ And that was the moment I knew that this is what I want to do. They say applause is the thing, and it really is. That applause is something I’ve been seeking ever since. It’s a direct form of communication.”
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