Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Thu 1 October 2026 2:45, UK
Famous and successful actors don’t live on the breadline, so realistically, they don’t have to make movies for anything other than artistic fulfilment, but can you really say that about Woody Harrelson?
After all, he’s been in his fair share of blockbusters and mindless genre flicks, and it’s hard to imagine him saying with a straight face that he agreed to star in three Now You See Me movies because of the rich, complicated character he was playing or the thought-provoking, complex narrative.
You can also add Roland Emmerich’s 2012 to that list, where he showed up in an extended cameo as a conspiracy theorist who gets immolated, or Solo: A Star Wars Story, The Hunger Games franchise, or Venom: Let There Be Carnage, none of which came across as particularly taxing performances.
The obvious recurring thread is that those big, bombastic, IP-driven films pay a lot more than an independent drama, and if you really want to split hairs, the only big-budget outing in Harrelson’s career where he was doing actual, proper Acting™ was War for the Planet of the Apes.
Despite the evidence to the contrary, and a lot of people saw that evidence, since those aforementioned features made billions upon billions of dollars at the box office, the three-time Academy Award nominee maintained that he hasn’t taken anything strictly for the money since 1995.
That was the year he re-teamed with his White Men Can’t Jump co-star Wesley Snipes for Money Train, which assumed that reuniting a popular pairing would achieve the same thing, except in this case, all it achieved was a widely panned flop that the star has regretted making for over 30 years.
While he pointed out that one of his driving forces was the chance to work with Snipes again, there was another, more lucrative incentive. “But, I also did it for the money,” he clarified. “And it’s been a long time before I could even acknowledge that out loud. I’ll never do anything for the money again.”
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
To keep him on the straight and narrow, he even invoked the name of a legendary songstress: “You know, when Tracy Chapman sings ‘all that you have is your soul’, I take it seriously,” he added, with Harrelson convinced that he would go the rest of his days without getting lured in by the dollar signs in his eyes.
Did it work? Maybe, maybe not. Based on the titles listed above, you could say no, but since he hasn’t come clean about accepting any of those jobs for the money, you could stretch things just about far enough to give him the benefit of the doubt.
