Woody Harrelson

Woodrow Tracy Harrelson (born July 23, 1961) is an American actor. He first became known for his role as bartender Woody Boyd on the NBC sitcom Cheers (1985–1993), for which he won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series from five nominations. Harrelson received three Academy Award nominations: Best Actor for The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), and Best Supporting Actor for The Messenger (2009) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017).

Other notable films include White Men Can't Jump (1992), Natural Born Killers (1994), The Thin Red Line (1998), No Country for Old Men (2007), Seven Pounds (2008), Zombieland (2009), Seven Psychopaths (2012), Now You See Me (2013), The Edge of Seventeen (2016), War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), Triangle of Sadness (2022), and Suncoast (2024). He also played Haymitch Abernathy in The Hunger Games film series (2012–2015) and Tobias Beckett in Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018).

Harrelson received further Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his portrayal of Steve Schmidt in the HBO film Game Change (2012) and a detective in the HBO crime anthology series True Detective (2014). He also portrayed E. Howard Hunt in the HBO political limited series White House Plumbers (2023).

Woodrow Tracy Harrelson was born on July 23, 1961, in Midland, Texas, to secretary Diane Lou and convicted hitman Charles Voyde Harrelson. He was raised in a Presbyterian household alongside his two brothers, Jordan and Brett, the latter of whom also became an actor. Their father received a life sentence for the 1979 killing of federal judge John H. Wood Jr.. Harrelson has stated he had little contact with his father during childhood. Charles died in the United States Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum Facility on March 15, 2007.

Harrelson's family was poor and relied on his mother's wages. He attended The Briarwood School in Houston, Texas. In 1973, he moved to his mother's native city of Lebanon, Ohio, where he attended Lebanon High School, from which he graduated in 1979.

Harrelson attended Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana, where he studied theater and English. While there, he was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity and became friends with former vice president Mike Pence. He graduated in 1983.

Harrelson is widely known for his work on the NBC sitcom Cheers. He played bartender Woody Boyd, he joined the cast in 1985 in season four, spending the final eight seasons (1985–1993) on the show. For this role, Harrelson was nominated for five Emmy Awards, winning once in 1989.

While still working on Cheers, Harrelson restarted his film career. His first movie had been Wildcats, a 1986 football comedy with Goldie Hawn. He followed his performance in Wildcats with the 1990 romantic comedy Cool Blue, alongside Hank Azaria. He reunited with Wesley Snipes (who also had debuted in Wildcats) in the box-office hit White Men Can't Jump (1992) and the action movie Money Train (1995). In 1993, 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. He then played Mickey Knox in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and Dr. Michael Raynolds in the Michael Cimino film The Sunchaser.