Hollywood legend Woody Harrelson told Esquire in an interview to promote his new HBO show about Watergate, White House Plumbers, that he thinks liberals are f*cking idiots. Woody plays E. Howard Hunt in the show.
ESQ: Something I found emotional in the series is that you see that Hunt really does feel torn between his politics and the fact that by not breaking with the plan, he fails his family. Woody, in your youth you canvassed for the Republican party. Went to the same college as Mike Pence. Did those experiences help you understand the paranoia Hunt was feeling?
WH: I understand it. And there’s still a fear of communism. We still loathe Russia. There’s still all the concern about the liberal agenda. I get how this mentality develops. I’m really, basically, a little bit of both. There are things that the liberals do that I think, what f*cking idiots.
And then there’s also conservative ideology that strikes me as odd. I consider myself, really, an anarchist.
ESQ: Do you mean that you believe in no government? Or is it that you do believe in government but you don’t like either side?
WH: Well, I’m probably more of a libertarian. I never see government work. It always seems to be working for the people who got you there. It’s businessmen working for bigger businessmen.
It’s not businessmen working for their constituents. I think government just usually sucks…am I wrong? Even the social programs, they do it reluctantly, and they’re just always trying to gobble back what they can from the social programs.
ESQ: I don’t think you’re alone in feeling dismayed. You used to do a lot of public activism, but much of that has gone away. Is that related to these feelings?
WH: Yeah. I feel like they weren’t effective. You climb the Golden Gate Bridge to bring attention to the fact that they’re cutting down ancient redwoods in northern California.
Well, so what if you succeed? They’ll go cut the trees down somewhere else.
What would really succeed is making paper from some alternative product, something from the farmers…which, of course I did that for fifteen years and it just amounted to a huge waste of money.
But I do think there are ways to be proactive about changing things, particularly environmental things.
It really involves retooling the society and trying to get in where the problem starts as opposed to trying to clean it up later.
ESQ: But does anything ever get back to you, Woody? Like after your SNL monologue this winter that stirred up a lot of controversy. Does that register with you at all?
WH: Well, people told me it was, shall we say, trending. No, I don’t look at that shit. I feel like, “I said it on SNL.”
I don’t need to go further with it…other than to say—well, no, I won’t. Never mind. That’s enough.…But it don’t change my life one bit.
Not one bit, if the mainstream media wants to have a go at you, right? My life is still wonderful.