WOODY HARRELSON
WHO WAS MANEY GAULT?
Hint: He bore no relation to John Galt in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Better hint: He bore arms and rode shotgun with Texas Ranger legend Frank Hamer, tracking down the most infamous, chronically romanticized outlaw couple of the 1930s.
Even better hint: He bore a workable resemblance to his portrayer in the Netflix film The Highwaymen (March 29)—an actor who commands a tad more name recognition than Maney Gault these days and could honestly do without the whole grandiose introduction here. Just ask him.
“I wasn’t all that confident in this role,” Woody Harrelson volunteers in typical plain-talk under-statement, when pressed on his latest of so many acclaimed performances covering a gamut of characters and genres over the last three decades since his breakout days of Cheers. “But then I saw the finished product—and I really like the movie. It’s just such a big story in our history. I mean, everybody kinda knows where it’s going, but it’s quite the amazing journey.”
The latest stop of his own amazing journey, The Highwaymen teams up the 57-year-old actor with Kevin Costner, as a pair of veteran Texas law enforcers commissioned to track down the elusive Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow and their bank-robbing, cop-shooting, Texas-to-Ohio havoc-wreaking Barrow Gang.
“Seeing it from the lawman’s perspective was what really grabbed me from the start with this project,” notes Harrelson, whose recent run of nuanced cop roles garnered an Oscar nomination for his work in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and devoted fans for HBO’s True Detective series. “Y’know, no one ever really thinks about that with Bonnie and Clyde. What it was like from the other side.”
Talking with Woody Harrelson on a Tuesday morning from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it can be a trip just getting your head around the fact that the easygoing dude casually chatting over the phone from his lofty. And ’s Roy Munson. Larry Flynt, LBJ, ’s Capt. Tony Stone, Haymitch Abernathy of , ’s Tobias Beckett, Billy Hoyle in , ’s Pepper Lewis, and so many others.
