Given some of his own run-ins with the law as an extracurricular hemp activist, Woody Harrelson says he never imagined he’d be playing a cop on screen. The gritty drama “Rampart” casts the 50-year-old actor as a thoroughly disreputable Los Angeles police officer whose shady practices – on and off the job – gradually catch up with him.
The movie reunites Harrelson with Oren Moverman, who directed him to an Oscar nomination for 2009’s “The Messenger," and it casts him opposite a uniformly strong supporting cast that includes Sigourney Weaver, Robin Wright, Ned Beatty, Steve Buscemi, Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche, Ben Foster and Ice Cube.
Q: Do you need to like or identify with a character in order to play it? And how unsettling is that, when you’re playing one as unconscionable as this cop in “Rampart”?
A: Well, I think it would be hard to play a character you had no connection to at all. In this case, it was mainly about finding the humanity in him and relating to that, even if it's only that we both love our families. When I first read the script, I knew in my gut that this was going to be one of the most challenging parts I could ever imagine. In another way, though, it's like any other role. You bring to it whatever you can of yourself to hook into and the rest of it is just about using your imagination. The guy's a creep, but I have to accept him on his own terms, from his own point of view, no matter how twisted it might be. He does a lot of bad things, but the way he sees it, he's only doing bad things to bad people.
Q: Given the character and the subject matter, is the process of working on a movie like this inherently less “fun” for you than doing something lighter?
A: Sure. Usually, doing comedies is the most fun. But fun isn't really the right word. Because at the same time, getting to play scenes with as much meat on them as these have, getting to work with so many other terrific actors in the cast, that's a pretty great experience of its own, a real privilege.
Q: Are you the kind of actor who can let his character go at the end of the day, or does it stick with you the whole time you’re making the film?
A: To be honest, I think this one crept in and lingered with me a bit more than normal. Friends kept kidding me about how the text messages I was sending them felt sort of paranoid or mean-spirited, so I guess I was letting the character seep into my real life.
Q: In your various political and social causes, you’ve been widely known to question the authority of law enforcement officials. Did this experience change your opinion of cops in any way or simply reinforce it?
A: I met with a lot of them as part of my research. Most of them were pretty cool. A few of them were fantastic, actually. But some of them were weren't and it's those guys who tend to give everybody else such a bad rap. My feeling is that the problem isn't so much about the job itself as it is about the individuals we entrust to do the job. It definitely makes you appreciate the good ones all the more.
Q: You’ve worked with Oren Moverman before on “The Messenger.” What do you want or need from a director in general and what do you like about working with him in particular?
A: I'm an actor who has a lot of ideas, so it's always nice working with a director who values your opinions. Some directors don't. They want to tell you where to move, where to stand, how to say and do every little thing, where the actor essentially becomes nothing more than a pawn on a chessboard. Oren appreciates me. He lets all of the actors dig into the characters on their own. He's very open to experimentation and improvisation. Rather than having us interact or rehearse in advance, he brings us together and waits to see what happens, what new shapes develop, where the scene goes, how it morphs and evolves in the moment. That's what it's all about.
About the Author
