(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Mon 20 October 2025 21:15, UK
It’s arguable, but it might well be that in a career spanning some 40 years, Woody Harrelson did his absolute best work in the 2014 HBO series True Detective, alongside Matthew McConaughey. It was a huge success and spawned three more series, although none stood up to that brilliant first season.
But it wasn’t the only time Harrelson had played a detective; three years before that he appeared in Rampart, a gritty, twisted film about a corrupt LAPD officer that featured something of an all-star cast with Sigourney Weaver, Ice Cube, Brie Larson and Steve Buscemi. While an excellent film, it didn’t do too well at the box office, which is more than can be said for the other time Harrelson put on an FBI jacket.
That was for a 2011 movie called After the Sunset, an action comedy with Pierce Brosnan in which Harrelson played an FBI agent, a part that he admitted at the time was slightly surprising to people given he is a marijuana advocate with a former hitman for a father.
Directed by Rush Hour’s Brett Ratner, it told the story of Brosnan’s master thief succeeding in a final big score before being hunted down by Harrelson’s character.
The heist movie was anything but a success, barely breaking even on release and essentially operating as a free holiday for the cast and crew to the Bahamas. But Harrelson’s co-star in the movie, Mexican actor Salma Hayek certainly made an impression on him to say the least.
He told IGN: “Salma is just one of the great goddesses ever put on this Earth. Actually, every year, she gets more beautiful… As a person, she’s also, you know, she’s one of those people who truly cares about her friends and is always making sure that everyone’s okay…There’s just something extraordinary about that Salma Hayek.”
So he quite liked her then it would seem. In a bit of a turn up, 20 years later after its release the movie actually started to do quite well on Netflix, but that didn’t help the film’s fairly woeful score on Rotten Tomatoes, and it isn’t one you’ll hear many people reference as a great example of the heist genre.
That said it’s just a blip on Harrelson’s record given he has been in some pretty fantastic stuff over the years, and he looks to have plenty more on the way. This week he was seen in Paris working on a new movie called Full Phil with Kristen Stewart, about a future in the French capital where AI decides who gets to live where.
He’s also going to be in a third installment of the Now You See Me franchise, the first movie since 2016 plus a couple of TV series: Brothers, which will see him reunited with McConaughey and The Most Dangerous Man in America, which is about the author and psychologist Timothy Leary, the man who caused a lot of controversy in the States in the 1960s, basically because he liked drugs so much.
Hayek meanwhile recently wrapped on Sacrifice, an action comedy with a star-packed cast including Charli XCX, Chris Evans and Vincent Cassel. It’s based around a celebrity gala that gets attacked by armed activists hunting down a supposedly supernatural relic. Which lets face it, is the kind of evening that happens all the time.
Related Topics