Woody Harrelson Was a Sitcom Actor When He Got Cast as a Mass Murderer

Vintage clothing

Before Natural Born Killers, Woody Harrelson was Woody from Cheers. The lovable bartender. The simple guy with the good heart. NBC viewers knew his face as the face of a man who didn't understand jokes but tried his best. Then Oliver Stone cast him as Mickey Knox — a serial killer who falls in love with another serial killer and goes on a road trip that ends with 52 dead bodies — and Harrelson's career split into two timelines that never fully merged back together.

The casting was deliberate. Stone wanted the cognitive dissonance of watching the Cheers guy commit cinematic atrocities. The same warmth that made Harrelson work as a sitcom character made Mickey Knox feel human in a way that a conventionally menacing actor wouldn't have achieved. You weren't supposed to like Mickey. You liked him anyway. That was the film's point, or one of its points — the machinery of screen charisma makes monsters feel like friends.

Harrelson prepared for the role by visiting a maximum-security prison and spending time with actual convicted murderers. In interviews from the period, he described the experience as disorienting — the gap between what these men had done and how normal they seemed in conversation. That gap is the whole movie.

This tee is the white variant of the 1994 promo series. The Harrelson portrait is the selling point: Mickey Knox before you know what he's done, just a face that looks like someone you'd trust. White tees from the 90s are harder to find in good shape than black ones — they stained, they yellowed, they got relegated to the rag pile faster. The ones that survived are the ones someone cared about enough to keep clean.

Vintage condition. There's one.

Woody Harrelson Was a Sitcom Actor When He Got Cast as a Mass Murderer

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