Woody Harrelson lets the Internet ask him anything (about the movie he's specifically there to plug)
Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything”—a sort of Meet The Press where the “press” is unusually interested in your penis—is slowly becoming an obligatory stop on the standard press junket, having scored successful, albeit some-more-candid-than-others interviews with people like Louis C.K. and Giancarlo Esposito. But as evidenced by Friday’s AMA session with Woody Harrelson, not everyone’s publicist is familiar with the literal definition of “anything,” which is how Harrelson ended up being frustrated in his attempts to promote his new movie Rampart by people who, unpredictably, would have preferred that he talk about other things, specifically anything but Rampart. That insistence on hewing so closely to the meanings of words can be summed up in this query from user AndyRooney (probably not his real name), which was the first question Harrelson fielded:
I swear this is a true story. I went to a high school in LA and you crashed our prom after party (Universal Hilton). You ended up taking the virginity of a girl named Roseanna. You didn't call her afterwards. She cried a lot. Do you remember any of this and can confirm or have you been so knee deep in Hollywood pooty for so long that this qualifies as a mere blip?
Setting the tone for the rest of the interview, Harrelson replied, “First off, its not true, and second off, I don't want to answer questions about that. Lets focus on the film people”—an answer that immediately rankled the Reddit community, who pointed out that they weren’t there to listen to him plug his latest movie, but rather to Ask [Him] Anything, up to and including the current stratum of Hollywood pooty he currently occupies.
Unfortunately, as you can see in some of the play-by-play chronicled here, Harrelson responded by deflecting every single one of their questions and referring it back to Rampart, spinning the standard “working with director Oren Moverman was so rewarding” PR blather that is the bane of every celebrity Q&A. That is, when he wasn’t simply dismissing a question with “I don’t really think about those things,” as though being asked a question isn’t itself a prompt to think about those things, maybe.
Anyway, things only got worse, and after many called him on his refusal to do anything but discuss Rampart, Harrelson curtly responded, “I consider my time valuable” before bowing out of the session completely. Somehow the reminder that Woody Harrelson is a busy famous person—and, as some postulated, possibly even so busy that he allowed a publicist to step in for him in this interview—did not appease the riled Reddit masses, who have responded with a still-flowing deluge of new threads, GIFs, and assorted meme-stuff mocking Harrelson that's currently flourishing across the Internet.
Even Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian himself summed up the AMA session as an “epic fail,” which is the most searing criticism available to modern man, now that H.L. Mencken is dead. And while the Internet may be able to channel some of its disappointment into making fake movie posters and the like, and taking out our frustration on Woody as the web’s new favorite whipping boy, the truth is we are now a nation of Roseannas—left crying, confused, and more than a little empty after just one Friday night with Woody Harrelson.