"It's always been my ambition to be in a movie that aspires to say something," says Woody Harrelson, whose latest film is positively garrulous. directed by Milos Forman, The People vs. Larry Flynt is the down and dirty story of hustler publisher Larry Flynt's battles to remain ungagged during his ferocious, at times carnivalesque courtroom battles of the seventies and eighties, which climaxed in an endorsement of the First Amendment's unlikeliest champion by the US Supreme Court. it's the most politically committed and infectious piece of Capra-corn to emerge from a hollywood studio in some time, and a red flag to the forces of censorship and control.

Harrelson is one of the least vain and self-conscious film actors in America, and there's something supremely touching about his willingness to be loud, crass, and sleazy onscreen. It pays off magnificently in Larry Flynt, particularly in his scenes with Courtney Love--herself a revelation as Flynt's fourth wife, the late Althea Leasure Flynt. Romance between a midwestern scoundrel and a go-go girl, the movie implies, may be as tender and ennobling as love between fauns an nymphs.

Harrelson--along with Love, their co-star Edward Norton (who plays Flynt's long-suffering attorney, Alan Isaacman), Forman, and Flynt himself had just had an audience with Vaclav Havel in Prague when we tracked down the thirty-five-year-old former Cheers star in London. He was just getting over "a monster bender," he told Lynda Obst, but she son got him talking.

Lynda Obst: Was it the psychological complexities of Lary Flynt that attracted you to playing him in a film, or was it the part of you that's political?
WH: All that came later. I was initially attracted to working with Milos Forman, but I wasn't too jazzed about the prospect of doing a movie about Larry Flynt. In fact, I had lived in Lebanon, Ohio, while the Cincinnati [obscenity] trial [against Flynt, in 1977] was going on. Even though a good percentage of my early sexual experiences resulted from Larry Flynt's indirect help, I have to say I thought of him as a sleazebag. I didn't think there was anything worthwhile about him. I was still this Christian boy with the same views that everyone else in the community had.
LO: In that part of the movie when Larry goes through his born again phase under the influence of Ruth Carter Stapleton [played by Donna Hanover], I must admit I found myself siding with Althea, who's none too impressed by his conversion. Because of your own Christian background, did you understand Larry getting religion?
WH: I could relate to it, although it was different for me because I was indoctrinated at a very young age. I was a fervent churchgoer as a kid and we had Bible study over at our house. I even gave a couple of sermons. God knows, they probably weren't all that inspiring. When your faith unravels, though, it just unravels. I don't think I'll ever be affiliated with any organised religion again. But I believe there are a lot of paths to the truth.
LO: Did your views on Larry Flynt change when you read the script?
WH: I thought it had a good structure, but it was reading interviews with Larry and seeing documentaries on him that really got me interested. No matter what people said about the guy, whenver he opened his mouth to speak he was not only bright and articulate, but he was speaking a lot of truth. I was pretty nervous when I first sat down with him, and I didn't know what to expect. But he's a very charming guy and the thing I liked about him most was not just the quality of his opinions, but more particularly his honesty. He really lets himself be vulnerable.
LO: In his forword to Larry Flynt's book, An Unseemly Man, Oliver Stone writes of Flynt: "...the country boy, misunderstood by so many, trying to figure it all out, rafting down the American psyche of a country gone wacko." When I read it, I thought, I can see Woody in that.
WH: On the surface at least, there are a lot of similarities between us. We're both poor white trash who made good in the world--or bad. Either way, we've had our success. And I think we've both had a lot of sexual obsession in our lives, and hopefully, gained some wisdom through it. I feel that my attraction to women has educated me, and I think that's true of Larry, too. But there are a lot of contradictions in him. You can say that he exploits women, and he would say that it's part of his business to exploit women. At the same time, he has a great deal of reverence for them. I know he revered Althea in a big way.
LO: And empowered her.
WH: Yes. She was one of the first women of her time to be running magazines, and she was very young. He really believed in her.
LO: So you believe you share the extremes of personality that Larry Flynt has--particularly when it comes to women?
WH: One time my brother, Brett, was standing in the checkout line of a supermarket in some town in Ohio. He saw this guy reading a story about me on the front page of one of the tabloids, and he randomly asked him, "So what do you think of Woody?" And the guy said, "Oh, he treats women like shit." And I thought, How would he know that I treat women like shit? The only way he'd know is because I've been forthcoming about my faults. I think that has probably tainted people's opinions of me. I've been grappling with the fact that people I don't know--and friends, too--think of me as this guy who's obsessed with women and my sex drive. And yet who I am-- much more than that--is this guy who's very devoted to his woman and his family. I don't talk about Laura [Louie, his partner] much, but I feel totally blessed by our relationship. I've put her through a lot and she's experienced a lot of pain, but she's always been incredibly loyal to me. The only way I can be in a relationship with her, or with anyone, is to have a certain amount of freedom, not that I have any great desire for anyone else. It's important for me to say how much I love her.
Here's one of the things that really impressed me about Larry. A few months ago when Laura and I were having problems, I talked with him about it. The next thing I knew, he called up Laura without my knowing it and had lunch with her and tried to explain his views on the world to her.
LO: Larry Flynt, marriage counselor?
WH: Exactly. You'd never think this, right? When I heard he'd done it, I was shocked and pleased.
LO: Don't you think that some of the excessive reactions you get these days come from everyone first knowing you as Woody the happy-go-lucky bartender on Cheers?
WH: Definitely. The irony is that I was this really obsessed guy years before I'd even heard of Cheers. But I guess once you cultivate one image, it's not wise to try to recultivate it.
LO: Has it been hard for you to explore the many different sides of your personality when everyone wants you to be their bartender and best friend?
WH: Well, firstly, I do like that aspect. At least when I go into a bar, I generally don't have to pay for drinks. That goes a long way. [laughs] I know that doing Natural Born Killers [1994] was a big split from anything I'd done before. I remember I got into this long debate when Julie Andrews did that movie [S.O.B., 1981] in which she showed her breasts. I was a teenager at the time and very opinionated, as I am now, and I didn't think that Mary Poppins should be showing her breasts.
Similarly, there's a debate as to whether or not Woody Boyd [Harrelson's character on Cheers] should be able to be Mickey Knox [his character on Natural Born Killers]. Then there was the moral debate about the influence Natural Born Killers had. I found it hard to conceive that someone could watch a two-hour movie and become a serial killer. I thought that was missing the point of he movie. By the same token, if it had such a negative impact on people, that bums me out.
LO: But it's a similar case to The People vs. Larry Flynt, isn't it? Anyone can think what they like about it, but a filmmaker has a right to make a film that pushes the limits of the First Amendment in a way that protects the less egregious or extreme cases. That relates to my next question. Do you think that Larry Flynt pursued his court cases as a form of self-promotion, or do you think he had an idealistic belief in the right to publish what he wanted?
WH: There's no question he started doing it because he had to. But when, after the Cincinnati case, he was sentenced to seven-to-twenty-five years, I think he started to see that justice had not been served. In the movie, Larry plays the judge who passes that sentence. I thought that was great, because I find that I keep coming back to the issue that we have to face our shadows. When they're unmasked, the people we perceive to be our enemies are really the aspects of ourselves that we loathe. So for Larry to get up there and play someone he probably hated so much was admirable. I talked to him about it, and he said it was a cathartic experience.
LO: Do you think that first verdict politicized Larry?
WH: It started to. Someone doesn't spend $40 million and twenty years in court--as Larry did-- just out of narcissism. He is still passionate about the issues he fought for and, for example, the fact that freedom of speech on the Internet is being threatened. And you can see that the government is just rubbing its hands together waiting to jump in on the Net. That to me is a big question right now: Where do you let them start censoring things? Most people would say," Hey, I don't want child pornography on the Internet," but that makes everything vulnerable to censorship.
LO: That's why those boundaries that protect even extremely bad taste have to be maintained, as the Supreme Court ruled in the Larry Flynt case. What was the moment that politicized you, Woody?
WH: I remember I had just been to Machu Picchu [site of an ancient Inca city in Peru]. And I was back doing Cheers in January 1991 when [the US] started bombing Iraq. I lived right by UCLA at the time, and I went there to check out a sit-in against the war. There was a news camera, and I opened my rather large mouth and spoke out against the bombing. Then I was disinvited from the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans and it became a hot thing. At the time, I really didn't know that much, but I felt the Gulf War was wrong and I started to educate myself on the subject. That's when I found out just how wrong it was. I think the United States wanted there to be a war there.
LO: Did it hurt you to take that position?
WH: I immediately got a lot of flak, and then I started getting hate mail. It's not the kind of thing that you do to increase your popularity--and my championing of hemp doesn't either. But I decided at the time that my career had already extended past what I had expected it to, and if it was going to be over, then so be it.
LO: And what you believed in was more important than protecting yourself?
WH: Yes.
LO: Do you think that in taking a moral stance on censorship Larry Flynt was, in some way, seeking redemption?
WH: He's a complex guy who was born in very simple circumstances. Then to become as wealthy as he did...I think he did seek some kind of moral redemption for that.
LO: We've talked about some of the similarities between you and Larry. Do you think there's some aspect of him that's a shadow of you, in the way that he indulged in his sexual fantasies whereas you fight your own unbridled impulses? [both laugh]
WH: I think he's a shadow figure for a lot of people. O.K. I know I'm Mr. Tangential; that's understood. But if somene goes into a theater to watch this movie and comes away feeling compassion for Larry Flynt, does that mean he or she is suddenly a proponent of Hustler magazine? No. It means that you've taken all the rough edges off the world. The world is not just black-and-white.It's mostly gray.
LO: As you were speaking, I was thinking that Larry Flynt is America's shadow, and that's why he's so completely terrifying to the Charles Keatings and the Jerry Falwells who profess to stand for America with their righteous apple-polish veneer. There's a great moment in the movie when Hustler is being distributed at this conservative dinner as an example of moral decline, and all those holier-than-thou people are grabbbing at it and sneaking looks at it. Larry Flynt was one of the people who exposed that "dark sexuality" that lurks behind a tremendous amount of pious talk and religious facades in ths country. And he took the lid off the hypocrisy that goes with it.
WH: And there were few people more demonized than him for doing it. I agree he represented the dark side of sexuality, but the question is, Why is there a dark side to sexuality? Why are all the issues that get brought up, particularly by the religious fundamentalists, about sex? I know from my youth that it's difficult to grow up with religion and then have a comfortable view of sex where you feel like it's a wholesome and positive act. You're made to feel that the only sexual experience you can have is when you're married and it's for procreation-- and maybe you pray before and after. In so many people's Christian upbringings, so much emphasis has been put on the rights and wrongs of sexuality--mostly the wrongs. To me, it's sexual repression that creates all the madness.
LO: Do you think there is something ironic about the fact that Larry Flynt was shot and paralyzed from his waist down and lost his sexual capacity in midlife--as if it were retribution for his exploiting sexuality?
WH: Gee whiz. I don't know. You'd have to ask him.
LO: What do you think his lasting importance is?
WH: I think it was what he achieved in his fights in those courts. In terms of this movie, I think it's the really unlikely love story that existed between him and Althea. These guys had a wild relationship. As long as Althea was his main squeeze, she didn't mind if he had sex with other woman. I think that's pretty unusual, and I guess a lot of people would say unnatural. I wouldn't. Neither one was tethering the other. Monogamy is, to me, one of the most confusing things about getting married. People, from my mother to whoever, are always asking me when I'm going to get married, especially now that I've got two kids. At least in the traditional understanding of what marriage is, I can't figure it. Are we both going to sign a legal document saying that we're bound to each other, and that we can never be with anyone else physically because that's the great betrayal? The understanding I always felt that I should have in a relationship was, "I love you and I want to spend time with you. Past that, you're free. " Because as soon as I start feeling unfree, then I start feeling uncomfortable.
LO: Throughhout your career as a television and movie star, at whatever cost it may have had on your personal popularity, you've been completely unfettered in terms of giving your honest opinions. I think that's rare in this time of spin. It's also one of the great legacies of Larry Flynt, a so-called "scumbag" who invoked the First Amendment to protect us when we stand up for what we believe in, even when it's unpopular. The People vs. Larry Flynt gives us an incredibly deep portrayal of how one really marginally American preserved all of our rights.
WH: He's an unlikely hero.
LO: But you're not. [laughs]
WH: Well, I appreciate your saying that. But to be honest with you, and you may not see it, I feel myself constantly struggling with my own censorship. The most important thing right now for me in my life is to be uncensored. Just to be able to say what you feel is so hard, particularly in romantic relationships. I always feel like I'm holding something back, that I don't say all that I want or need to say. And I think there's nothing more important than answering fully and not censoring yourself when someone asks you a question. And you sometimes have to make yourself vulnerable in order to freely express yourself. You have to cut yourself open and let your insides out. And, boy, is that hard.
LO: One more question. I've never known why you're called Woody. what's your real name?
WH: Hard-on.[LO laughs]. No. It's Woodrow.
LO: I figured there was a "Woody" in there someplace. From me and all of us to you over there in England, "Cheers".
WH: [laughs] Thanks, Lynda. It's been hellaciously cool talking to you. Copyright:INterview Magazine, Dec,'96.

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