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"  It sounds like a Hollywood urban legend: Woody Harrelson\u2014with his lilting drawl and rugged mug; that bald head, long Roman nose, and delirious smile; those piercing baby blues that have turned famously cold to play psychos and renegades and jerks\u2014passed on the lead role in Jerry Maguire. In 1996, the year it came out and its star, Tom Cruise, was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, Harrelson was nominated too, for his portrayal, in Milos Forman&amp;#039;s The People vs. Larry Flynt, of the grotesque and iconoclastic porn peddler who probably would have been class-degenerate to Maguire&amp;#039;s star quarterback. Both lost (to Geoffrey Rush, for Shine), but Harrelson&amp;#039;s electric performance as Flynt cemented his rep as a powerhouse actor. So Cruise added another iconic Casanova to his r\u00E9sum\u00E9, while Harrelson became forever linked to an insufferable blowhard whom he just happened to play to perfection...maybe too much perfection.  So imagine that Harrelson had played Jerry Maguire. And think of him not as the stoner, the beatnik, the guy who climbed the Golden Gate Bridge to protest the logging of old-growth forests, the guy arrested for planting hempseed in Kentucky. Remember that he can play the lover\u2014convincingly, with slow-simmering Southern charm and palpable, sweaty, full-bodied sex appeal (like in that scene in Indecent Proposal when he and Demi Moore have a screaming, shoe-tossing fight, then go at it on the kitchen floor). No, Harrelson doesn&amp;#039;t look like Cruise, but sexy doesn&amp;#039;t always equal symmetrical: Which one of them could be the Marlboro Man? Exactly.  What if Harrelson had been the one to show up at Ren\u00E9e Zellweger&amp;#039;s door; if &amp;quot;You complete me&amp;quot; had been uttered in his Texas twang and carried the trademark-Woody rolling L, which sounds like his tongue is riding the wave of the word instead of just, well, saying it? Had Harrelson followed his turn as Roy Munson, the con-man-with-a-comb-over in the Farrelly brothers&amp;#039; dumb-funny, cult-beloved Kingpin, with the lead in the quintessential &amp;#039;90s rom-com, would we think of him differently? Who&amp;#039;s to say? And maybe it doesn&amp;#039;t matter anyway, because Woody Harrelson had me at hello.  Actually, he had me well before hello, well before I met him at the Waldorf Astoria in mid-September, wearing my fiercest stilettos, my stomach in knots. He sported organic hemp sweatpants and fleece-lined Crocs, looking taut, tanned, and, at 48, still boyish in a way that goes beyond his dimples. &amp;quot;Do you like doing interviews?&amp;quot; I stuttered gamely. Harrelson cracked his flirty half-smile and drawled, &amp;quot;I looooathe them,&amp;quot; putting an arm around my shoulder as we headed for the interview suite.  He is instantly disarming. Kicking off his Crocs, he analyzes my handwriting (&amp;quot;See that upward slant? It&amp;#039;s optimistic&amp;quot;), insists I eat his extra meal (&amp;quot;Look, I got two\u2014seriously&amp;quot;), and offers me his eco-fleece jacket (&amp;quot;Are you cold?&amp;quot;) without blinking an eye.  On-screen, he can be a mighty convincing asshole\u2014as Flynt, as serial killer Mickey Knox in Oliver Stone&amp;#039;s acid-trippy satire Natural Born Killers, and, in his latest award-worthy performance in The Messenger, as Tony Stone, an alcoholic, misogynistic, brutish U.S. Army captain in the Iraq War assigned to casualty notification duty. The jerks Harrelson portrays aren&amp;#039;t memorable because they&amp;#039;re jerks, they&amp;#039;re memorable because Harrelson plays them to the bone, so artfully that people can&amp;#039;t help but wonder what loony-juice he&amp;#039;s drinking in real life. They wonder too because he&amp;#039;s a frustratingly unboxable celebrity, a confident mix of contradictions: manly and warm, goofy and grounded, defiant and easygoing. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s what makes people nervous and confused about him,&amp;quot; says Milos Forman, going on to proclaim, &amp;quot;Woody is a force of nature! He&amp;#039;s not an actor; he&amp;#039;s an original.&amp;quot;   Harrelson is also a world-famous star who doesn&amp;#039;t sweat the press release. He&amp;#039;s had run-ins with paparazzi and police; has chosen a quiet life in Maui with his nonactress wife, Laura Louie, and their three daughters; and has always put his politics (pro-hemp, antiwar, pro-alternative energy) where you can see them. And he was beating the green drum way before it was trendy. (In Roland Emmerich&amp;#039;s 2012, he plays a hippie environmentalist radio host who predicts the end of the world\u2014typecasting?)  ELLE: For all your outspoken politics, it seems as if your character in The Messenger, Captain Tony Stone, is someone you wouldn&amp;#039;t even want to have a drink with.  WOODY HARRELSON:  Yeah, I do like to go for parts that are outside the scope of what I&amp;#039;d personally be into. It&amp;#039;s always been my thing to be like, This war is bullshit, it&amp;#039;s an oil war, it&amp;#039;s wrong. And I think that perspective, while valid, also lacks validity in the sense that I&amp;#039;d never understood what soldiers went through until I started hanging out with them. These are people who make no money. They&amp;#039;re doing it for love of country. I&amp;#039;m not saying everybody has a pure motive\u2014some people just want to shoot shit up\u2014but the people I met seemed to really care.  ELLE:  You also come across as someone who cares\u2014about the world, the environment. What&amp;#039;s it like being constantly conscious?  WH: It&amp;#039;s exhausting. Everything I do, I try to think, Okay, what are the ramifications? Like, with the clothes I wear, I prefer if it&amp;#039;s grown organically, because cotton\u2014which is what&amp;#039;s used in most clothing\u2014takes up 50 percent of all pesticide use. The other day I asked someone to get me some green tea, and he brought it in a Styrofoam cup. I haven&amp;#039;t used Styrofoam in years, literally.  ELLE: Do you ever wish you could stop caring so much?  WH:  The only thing that&amp;#039;s problematic is the constant explaining, the constant need to kind of go, No, I don&amp;#039;t want that because of such and such. I feel like I&amp;#039;m a pain in the ass, and I don&amp;#039;t like being difficult.  Harrelson is nothing if not thoughtful. But lest we forget, he can be a total cutup. In the recent Zombieland, he played Tallahassee, a chainsaw-wielding cowboy with two simple goals: killing zombies and eating Twinkies. Costarring with three shiny young&amp;#039;uns (Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin), Harrelson did all the justice in the world to lines such as, &amp;quot;Thank God for rednecks,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Time to nut up or shut up,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;You wanna see how hard I can punch?&amp;quot; (Not to mention this soon-to-be statement T-shirt: &amp;quot;Goddammit, Bill Fucking Murray!&amp;quot;)  Harrelson has long been gifted at carrying the burden of great lines; the dead-on deadpan can be traced to Cheers, the masterfully written early-&amp;#039;80s-to-early-&amp;#039;90s sitcom in which he played Woody Boyd, the lovable na\u00EFf. (I could recite a dozen of his kickers by heart\u2014e.g., &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d hate to be the second member of my family buried alive by potatoes&amp;quot;\u2014but Harrelson swears the only line he remembers is, &amp;quot;How are you today, Mr. Peterson?&amp;quot;) Boyd was cartoonishly unassuming, but Harrelson gave him more than enough heart and just enough credit to keep the shtick un-shticky.   But with White Men Can&amp;#039;t Jump (1992), bumpkin Boyd was \u00ADreplaced by Billy Hoyle, a cocky basketball hustler who was both \u00ADsecretly vulnerable and sexual beyond Woody Boyd&amp;#039;s dirtiest dreams. Remember that shower scene with Rosie Perez? She does.  &amp;quot;When he carried me into the shower and we were supposed to make out,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;I just took off my top. That wasn&amp;#039;t scripted! We had chemistry\u2014it just felt in the moment. I mean, aesthetically, he&amp;#039;s pleasing to the eye, but it&amp;#039;s a mixture of his sweetness, the fact that he&amp;#039;s really manly, and his over-the-top sense of humor. He comes across as self-assured without being arrogant, and that&amp;#039;s sexy.&amp;quot;  Perez goes on to talk about the first time she and Harrelson saw each other after the film wrapped. &amp;quot;Two years had passed, and we went out to dinner. It was so emotional we could hardly speak\u2014we were sitting across the table, and he reached out and we just held hands. That&amp;#039;s how special filming together had been, the chemistry we had. It was a connection that I&amp;#039;ve yet to duplicate in my career. Woody&amp;#039;s so open, so not judgmental, such a genuine guy. And sometimes he can be so stupid and silly, he has you on the floor laughing. I think the actors who desperately try to prove that they&amp;#039;re a \u00ADcertain way\u2014I feel sad for them. Woody just is. He&amp;#039;s living in the \u00ADmoment, and he doesn&amp;#039;t explain himself, ever. He just is.&amp;quot; ELLE:  People like you, but they misunderstand you, too.  WH:  Hmmm. I might be misunderstood. What&amp;#039;s your perception of me? ELLE:  Really nice guy, lovable, with a childlike enthusiasm for the world. Tons of \u00ADcharisma. Connected and grounded. But you get angry at the slightest thing\u2014but only if it means something to you, if it really offends your sensibilities\u2014and then, you become sort of like\u2014 WH:  An animal?! ELLE:  Right. Okay, how am I wrong? WH:  Hmmm. I like that whole sizing-up thing. Now I&amp;#039;ll tell you what I know about you. Perception: probably grew up as the smartest girl in your class. And even if you didn&amp;#039;t get the best grades\u2014 ELLE:  Oh, I did.  WH: You did. So I didn&amp;#039;t need that &amp;quot;even if&amp;quot; thing. What college did you go to? ELLE: Are you judging me?! WH:  No! I just want to know! Don&amp;#039;t say Dartmouth. ELLE: Not Dartmouth. WH: And funny. Were you always the funniest? ELLE:  Yes! WH:  You were! ELLE:  No, not really. WH:  Great speller.  ELLE:  True [blushing]. So what&amp;#039;s it like \u00ADhaving three little girls? WH: Best thing that ever happened to me, for sure. ELLE:  Did you ever want a boy? WH: At first I always wanted a boy, in that kind of patriarchal mind-set, I guess. And then when I had [first daughter] Deni, that vanished. It was just like, I love this little girl. There are enough men in the world.  ELLE:  Has it changed your view of women at all? WH:  Definitely. I remember meeting Oprah one time and, um, she didn&amp;#039;t like me very much. It was when I was doing Indecent \u00ADProposal\u2014and she was probably there more to interview Redford and Demi\u2014but she asked me some questions about my relationships with women and said, &amp;quot;Do you treat your girlfriends well?&amp;quot; And I said, &amp;quot;No, not really.&amp;quot; I was just being honest\u2014I really didn&amp;#039;t feel like I was a very good boyfriend. But I just remember this look of horror.  ELLE: And now? WH: I think having daughters makes me more conscious of how amazing they are, how sensitive. I don&amp;#039;t know...sometimes it seems like it would make more sense to live your life in reverse. You know? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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