Woody Harrelson covers the September issue of Esquire and the cover interview confirms several things that I’ve always assumed about him. The first assumption is that he really is pretty chill, baked and relaxed in real life: confirmed. The second assumption is that he just seems to wander around, doing cool stuff and interesting work, without a real “plan”: confirmed. The third assumption was that despite claims to the contrary, Woody still gets high AF: confirmed. Allow Woody to tell the story of how he came back to weed:

“Yep, I did quit….For almost two years. No smoking, no vaping. And then I ran into this guy”—he leans over and gives Rolling Stone Willie Nelson an affectionate chuck under the chin—“and that was that. See, everybody thinks of Willie as a model of progressive thinking and virtue, and he is, but he’s also got an evil side. Eee-vil. Now, Willie never felt too good about me quitting. And he kept trying to get me to not quit. We’d be playing poker and he’d pass me a vape pen, and I’d say, ‘Willie, man, I don’t do that anymore.’ And he’d act surprised, like it was news to him—every time, just as surprised as he could be. Then we were in Maui, and you know the whole reason I’m in Maui in the first place is Willie. Yeah, I went and saw one of his shows a number of years ago. I wanted to meet him. So afterward, I went to his bus and knocked on the door, and the door opened, and smoke was billowing out, and I look through the haze and I see this fellow with long hair holding a big old fatty, and he says, ‘Let’s burn one.’ And I know right away that he’s going to be a friend for life. He told me he had a place in Maui and to come on out, and that’s how I just sort of ended up there. Anyway, Willie passed me the pen after I’d won this huge pot. I was in a celebrating mood, so I snatched the pen from him and took a long draw. And Willie smiled at me and said, ‘Welcome home, son.’ ”

[From Esquire]

That’s a good story. I wish I had a “so now I’m smoking pot again” story which involved playing poker with Willie Nelson. But here’s the thing: I had literally no idea about any of this stuff about Woody’s father:

E. Howard Hunt was the ex–CIA agent who joined Nixon’s White House and then bungled the Watergate break-in. He was also rumored to have been the man behind JFK’s assassination. Several conspiracy theorists are convinced that he was the oldest of the three “tramps,” i.e., the trio of men arrested for vagrancy near the railroad tracks by the Texas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963. Those same conspiracy theorists are convinced that the tallest tramp was Charles Harrelson, Woody’s dad, a professional hitman and organized-crime figure who died in prison while serving a pair of consecutive life sentences for shooting a federal judge and who, during a subsequent standoff with police, jacked on cocaine and holding a gun on himself, confessed to murdering Kennedy.

[From Esquire]

Did you know that Woody’s father was a hitman who may or may not have had something to do with the JFK assassination?? I feel like that should be one of the first lines of every Woody Harrelson profile.

Anyway the rest of the profile is interesting too – Woody went to college, briefly, at Hanover in Indiana, at the same time as Mike Pence. Woody says that at the time, Pence “struck me as a nice guy, very sincere. I don’t know how well we’d get along now, but we got along okay then.” Woody also has a long-ass Donald Trump story about the time he had dinner with Trump, Melania, and Jesse Ventura and basically Trump wouldn’t STFU. Woody also says that he was offered – and turned down – the Tom Cruise role in Jerry Maguire – “I was offered—what’s the ‘Show me the money’ movie? Jerry Maguire? I was offered Jerry Maguire, and I said to Jim, ‘Nobody is going to give a s–t about an agent’.” All in all, I enjoyed this read. And I really didn’t know that about Woody’s dad.

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Photo and cover courtesy of Esquire.